Playing with the netcat chat

[viking60]

Netcat is pretty much a a Swiss Army knife of networks, and can be used for a lot.
This includes a Command line chat in a terminal.
So I googled and got tips how to do this all over the place....and it did not work.
Most places wanted me to do a.

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netcat -l -p 6666

6666 is an example of a portnumber you can pick another one.

So I started that on my Mandriva box and went to an Arch computer and entered:

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nc <IP_TO_THE_MANDRIVABOX> 6666

And as I said it did not work

So I connected to my Mandriva box via SSH and altered the command like this:

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nc -l 6666

Then I opened another terminal on my Archbox and entered

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nc 192.168.0.3 5555

Where 192.168.0.3 is the IP of the Mandriva box
Now the both terminals were in ready to write/receive mode and I wrote Smalahove (the first thing any Berserk can think of) and oh wonder it immediately poped up in my Mandriva terminal.
Answering in the Mandriva terminal immediatly pooped up on my Arch terminal so the chat was working to perfection.
To stop it, just hit CTRL+C

How can this be practical you say?
I dunno I did say I was playing.....
But just maybe there will come tips later that will make you see the light - who knows....

[rolf]

Smalahove!?! I keep having to tell GF (from VN), "No bones, no eyeballs, no chicken feet!", and this does not help.

The author describes this as a "bare-metal" program and that is along the lines of my inclinations, aka "nuts and bolts". I can imagine a cool, lean and mean irc session with one individual for some project or something, for example. However, like many cool things, there is not much current demand atm, hereabouts.

In Mandriva 2011, there is netcat-gnu, or netcat-openbsd, or netcat-traditional and I have the last installed. Also, I see gtknetcat, which looks interesting, as well:

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[rolf@localhost ~]$ urpmq -i gtknetcat
Name        : gtknetcat
Version     : 0.1
Release     : 5mdv2011.0
Group       : Graphical desktop/Other
Size        : 59323                        Architecture: x86_64
Source RPM  : gtknetcat-0.1-5mdv2011.0.src.rpm
URL         : http://lxde.sourceforge.net/
Summary     : Easy-to-use and handy GUI frontend of netcat (nc) command
Description :
Easy-to-use and handy GUI frontend of netcat (nc) command letting you
transfer files to another computer via direct wired connection.


Back to "bare-metal", there is /usr/share/doc/netcat-traditional/README that is quite rich with explanation, including reference to some scripts, such as /usr/share/doc/netcat-traditional/scripts/irc that might be of interest to Fearless Leader. All in all, netcat looks like a very good program.
Thanks for the Tip!

[viking60]

Ah ... Smalahove is really close to your favorite then - Does a skull even qualify as bones? And yes it has eyeballs but other than that...

I have to admit it is quite good Have some Beer and Aquavit with it and you have a perfect meal. (the traditional way to eat the eye is to pick it out and put it in the Aquavit before you take the lot).

And netcat is a bit insecure so it has more or less been replaced by socat.... I guess I will come back to it.

[viking60]

Try

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nc viking60.no-ip.org 5566

to chat with me right now!
Edit:
No that does not work.

[rolf]

Try

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nc viking60.no-ip.org 5566

to chat with me right now!
Edit:
No that does not work.

Don't you have to give some option switches?

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-p port      local port number (port numbers can be individual or ranges: lo-hi [inclusive])
...
-s addr      local source address
...

[viking60]

Yes on the server side - that was the client / your side
I Noticed there is a difference between Mandriva and Arch (between netcat versions - I guess) so in Arch I have to use the -p switch too.
The reason the above attempt did not work is due to the firewall which is fine...Netcat is good for testing stuff like that.