Ncat public Alpha release

[Chris Gibson <chris () linuxops net>]

Hi all,

This is a follow up to an earlier post from several weeks ago regarding ideas
for an Nmap Netcat, formally known as Ncat.

I have now officially released a public alpha version of Ncat, prompted by the
end of the Google's Summer of Code project.

Obviously, Ncat has only been in development for <10 weeks and this is the first
official release -- so things are likely to be a little rocky. :)

My intentions are to build up Ncat's userbase and start working on Ncat for the
long-term.

Ncat is available to download from SourceForge's FRS at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap-ncat/

There is still a lot of work to do. There are one or two bugs in the UDP listen
support at the moment and will be fixed with the next public release. Also, the
actual Ncat build process is fairly sparse and without the use of Autoconf.

Moreover, there are temporary build instructions in the README file in the main
Ncat directory which should get you up and running.

Briefly, this involves building Nmap's infrastructure libraries known as nsock &
nbase first before building Ncat. nsock and nbase are included alongside Ncat.

Due to the lack of Autoconf in the build process, specific details such as
needing to have the openssl libraries pre-installed and operating system
specified changes are currently unsupported.

The Windows port is currently in progress and will be released in the not too
distant future. I've managed to get Ncat to build on various versions of Linux
without too much hassle, as well as FreeBSD and I suspect it will build with
minor persuasion on MacOS X.

Once you get over the initial build process, i'm sure you'll like some of the
features included in Ncat:

* SOCKS4 server
* SOCKS4 client
* HTTP CONNECT method
* SSL support (currently only for outgoing, but this is changing next rel.)
* --allow/--deny/--allowfile/--denyfile for blocking specific IP addresses
(ranges) to your Ncat process.
* All original features of Netcat (nc) have been rewritten but without the port
scanner support :)
* Connection Brokering.
* ASCII logging
* Hex logging
* --exec takes variable parameters to the command to be executed.

... plus lots of other stuff with new features to come.

The next major release of Ncat will not only include an Autoconf build process,
possibly RPM and DEB's, SSL server support plus the Windows port!

If you have any patches, changes, groans, congrats, whatever; drop me an email
and we can have a chat. :)

Chris.
-- 
Chris Gibson (chris () linuxops net)

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