Re: Jacek's status report - #2 of 16

[Jacek Wielemborek <wielemborekj1 () gmail com>]

2013/6/18 David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 11:32:54PM +0200, Jacek Wielemborek wrote:
> > * Develop a working telnet negotiation demo. I believe it will be an
> > interesting challenge for the current --lua-exec implementation and I
> > can't wait to start writing the Websocket script!
>
> There might be some confusion here, because Telnet negotiation is not
> something that makes sense for --lua-exec. The -t option just causes
> Ncat to do things to automatically ignore certain byte patterns that
> Telnet servers emit.
>
> Think of --lua-exec this way: You are stuck on Windows and you don't
> even have a way to write shell scripts. But Ncat's built-in Lua
> interpreter lets you still write interesting little --sh-exec
> replacements.

Have you looked at my initial implementation? I estimated the proof of concept
to take more or less three days, it was more like three hours. I like the
explanation you just gave for embedding Lua - it really is a pain to code on
the bare Windows and I do believe that Ncat-Lua could help me there.

And for the telnet negotiation, I understood your point (or at least I think I
do) a while after I wrote that e-mail. I still think that coding it as a --
lua-exec makes a bit of sense though - as an interesting (at least for me)
proof of concept. I already wrote a tiny bit of code, though I didn't commit
it because it's still quite messy (OTOH, it features some stderr debugging
facilities along with a built-in hexdump!).

> --lua-exec should not require much implementation. Maybe 200 lines of
> new code, not including configure and Makefile. I estimate it will take
> only two weeks.
>
> > * Add Windows code? Although I definitely don't feel too happy about
> > it, I'm also convinced it's necessary to port the Lua functionality
> > sooner or later. My first attempts at cross-compiling Ncat with MinGW
> > failed, will probably need to work with Henri in order to figure out
> > how to build Nsock this way. Hopefully Wine will be enough to test the
> > builds.
>
> This is the supported way:
> http://nmap.org/book/inst-windows.html#inst-win-source
> Hopefully there won't be too much work to be portable. liblua is already
> nicely portable, and the hard parts of fork and exec replacements on
> Windows have already been figured out.

Sigh, MSVC. I wonder how much work would be needed for MinGW to support it as
well.
_______________________________________________
Sent through the dev mailing list
http://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/