RE: Ncat: Update and Feature Request

[Aaron Leininger <rilian4 () hotmail com>]

> So, while keeping in mind wanting to have an easy-to-maintain and non-bloated
> Ncat, what other features would you like to see?  Do you see any improvements
> that could/should be made on existing features?

Here's my initial feedback and reactions..
First off: I'm running on Debian 4.0 on i686 architecture...


./configure gave a warning about not finding ssl.h. I ran make and it compiled fine w/o ssl support. 
* I had to manually copy the file to /usr/bin. 
* running ncat w/o any arguments reports that I need a host to connect to and it quits. I'd recommend adding something 
like:
run: ncat -h for usage
*I wanted to try out the http proxy stuff but when I typed: man ncat, I got: No manual entry for ncat
Yet ncat -h says to see the man page for more details. How do I access it? I checked google(search terms: ncat manpage) 
and didn't see anything that looked like it. 
*I looked at the -h output and tried to guess the correct syntax for the http-proxy stuff. (name of proxy changed to 
protect the innocent ;-p)
I ran: ncat -v --proxy myproxy:8080 www.google.com 80 
I figured that would attempt a connection to www.google.com on port 80 and let me pull down a get request using myproxy 
port 8080 but I got:
Ncat: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused.
That is the same output I get if I do not specify a proxy. I sit behind one where I am testing so I can't get to 
external websites w/o it. 

Next I ran the same commands on an internal web-server. Below are the results:
ncat myserver 80 
  GET / HTTP/1.0
<returned correct html content>

ncat --http-proxy myproxy:8080 myserver 80
I got the same output as w/o the proxy but I did not have to issue the GET command myself. It seemed to issue it 
automatically and returned me the output as if I had issued the GET command from above. 

I'm not sure why it didn't work when I tried it on an external site such as google. 
I hope some of this is useful to you. 

* Next, I went and found that nmap 4.68 ships w/ ssl.h so I told the ./configure to use nmap's include folder for that 
file. ncat configured successfully but then would not make. Below is the end of the make output:
...
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lssl
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [ncat] Error 1


Am I missing a package? Can you see anything else I can correct to get ssl support working? Let me know if you need the 
configure or make output in full, I can attach them. 

Anyway, I hope some of this proves useful. Thanks for all your work! 
Aaron

_________________________________________________________________
Stay in touch when you're away with Windows Live Messenger.
http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_messenger2_072008

_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://SecLists.Org