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Date:      Fri, 21 Jan 2000 14:04:49 +0100
From:      "ROGIER MULHUIJZEN" <MULHUIJZEN@PZH.NL>
To:        <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Better fixit (was: Why was rsh removed from the fixit floppy?)
Message-ID:  <s88867ad.056@smtp.pzh.nl>

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>If you want a better fixit floppy, you should consider the new custom
>disk pair with PicoBSD (see picobsd(8) in -CURRENT).  It includes
>everything on the old fixit floppy, also real tar and a number of
>other programs, including rsh.  There's still space on there; what
>else could we put there?

I would really say netcat. It is the most versatile networking tool I
have seen so far.

For those of you not familiar with netcat, it is a utillity written by
l0pht (the well known gang of hackers). What it basically does is pipe
stdin to a network connection and the network connection back to stdout.
But it has all sorts of goodies around it.

It's already in the packages/ports and the README that comes with it
has a plethora of uses described (both a light side and a dark side),
most of which have nothing to do with fixit, but read on.

Most of my systems have portmap and the rlogin family disabled, as well
as the NFS_NOSERVER option in the kernel config. So to do backups over
the network I use netcat in the following way:

Filesystem /usr to be backed up from isis to venus (assuming nothing is
mounted on mountpoints within /usr):

[ root@venus:/usr/backups/isis ] # nc -l -p 5432 isis > isis_usr.tar

[ root@isis:/usr ] # tar cf - . | nc -w 3 venus 5432

which starts a netcat listening on port 5432 on venus, accepting
connections only from isis, redirecting all data into the tar file. And
a tar of the filesystem on isis with the data written through a pipe to
netcat which sends the data to anything listening on port 5432 on venus.
After 3 seconds of inactivity the nc on isis will shut down, closing the
network connection, which in turn will close the nc on venus.

I would love to be able to use the reverse of this in a fixit situation
without having to resort to making my own.

Unless of course there's already a way to do stuff like this with the
tools on the PicoBSD or fixit floppies, without using either NFS (which
I don't have on any of my machines) or rlogin related tools (of which I
only have the ssh family)...... in which case you can flame me for the
next 2 hours.

           DocWilco

P.S.: The original is available at
http://www.l0pht.com/users/10pht/nc110.tgz



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