How to modify input stream of netcat? - linux

I'm creating a TCP/IP interface to a serial device on a redhat linux machine. netcat in a bash script was used to accomplish this with out to much trouble.
nc -l $PORT < $TTYDEVICE > $TTYDEVICE
The problem is that the serial device uses carriage returns('\r') for line ends in its responses. I want to translate this to ("\r\n") so windows machines telneting in can view the response without any trouble. I'm trying to figure out how to go about this with a simple bash solution. I also have access to stty to configure the serial device, but there is no "\r" to "\r\n" translate on the input side(from what I can tell).
I did try to use tr on the input side of netcat, but it didn't work.
#cat $TTYDEVICE | tr '\r' '\r\n' | nc -l $PORT > $TTYDEVICE
Any ideas?

Your problem is that the client that connects to $PORT probably does not have a clue that it is working with a tty on the other side, so you will experience issues with tty-specific "features", such as ^C/^D/etc. and CRLF.
That is why
socat tcp-listen:1234 - | hexdump -C
telnet localhost 1234
[enter text]
will show CRLFs, while
ssh -t localhost "hexdump -C"
[enter text]
yields pure LFs. Subsequently, you would e.g. need
ssh -t whateverhost "screen $TTYDEVICE"
tl;dr: netcat won't do it.

This is overly difficult with standard tools, but pretty easy in perl (although perl is pretty much a standard tool these days):
perl -pe 's/\r/\r\n/g'
The version above will likely read the entire input into memory before doing any processing (it will read until it finds '\n', which will be the entire input if the input does not contain '\n'), so you might prefer:
perl -015 -pe '$\="\n"'

There are a number of versions of netcat (GNU and BSD) but you might want to try:
-C Send CRLF as line-ending

Related

How to interact with telnet using empty

I need to replace a very simple expect script that looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn telnet 192.168.1.175
expect {
"assword" {send "lamepassword\r"}
}
interact
With the equivalent bash script using empty, like this:
#!/bin/bash
empty -f -i in -o out telnet 192.168.1.175
empty -w -i out -o in "assword" "lamepassword\n"
After which I need the user to interact with telnet, which I do not know how to do. The closest thing that comes to my mind is binding stdin and stdout with named pipes using something like socat - in. Any suggestions are more than welcome!
I tried cat out & cat /dev/stdin >in, it works, but it has an extra
newline, tab completion does not work and ctr+c terminates cat and
not the running host process. I am trying to persuade socat to act
according to those needs.
Using socat for transmitting keyboard input to the telnet process is a good idea. Example:
cat out & socat -u -,raw,echo=0 ./in
For allowing Ctrl-C to terminate socat, add escape=3:
cat out & socat -u -,raw,echo=0,escape=3 ./in
But note that this will not terminate the telnet session, since it did start in daemon mode, so you can reconnect to telnet by executing socat again. To end telnet, you could just logout.

linux print directly to network printer that IS NOT installed

I need to build a simple web based printer server that will print a file to any given printers IP address
Using lp or lpr how can I print a file directly to a network printer by IP address? NOTE: The printer will NOT be setup in CUPS locally as it needs to have the ability to print to any IP address thrown at it.
What I have tried:
lp -d 10.11.234.75 /path/to/file
lpr -P 10.11.234.75 /path/to/file
Both give this: 'The printer or class does not exist.'
Try this:
cat you_file.prn | netcat -w 1 printer_ip 9100
If using bash then:
cat /path/to/file > /dev/tcp/10.11.234.75/9100
What you want to do is probably not feasible. If the printers at the ends of these IP addresses are just random printers, then the server you're building would need to know which driver to use to be able to print to them. If you haven't installed them in any way beforehand then it's not going to work.
If you only want to talk to other Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) servers then it is possible, although not necessarily elegant. I don't know of any other Linux implementations of an IPP client than CUPS, and CUPS requires you to install printers in advance. This can be done very easily though (as explained here). It's the same code to add a normal printer (but you need to know which driver to use) as for an IPP server. Alternatively, you might be able to find another IPP implementation (or write one - it should be fairly simple just to send a document) which doesn't require installing printers.
Here's the code to add an IPP printer to CUPS:
lpadmin -E -p <printer-name> -v http://<ip_address>:631/<dir>/<printer> -L <location> -E
<printer-name> and <location> can be whatever you like, and you need the full network path to the printer.
To add a normal printer:
lpadmin -E -p <printer-name> -v <device-uri> -m <model> -L <location> -E
This is the same, except that you need to give a <model>, which is the driver for the printer. Scrap the first -E if you don't want encryption.
If you want to delete the printer afterwards, use this:
lpadmin -x <printer-name>
I found an old program called tcpsend.c to send a file to a printer at an IP address. Build with gcc -o tcpsend tcpsend.c
$ ./tcpsend
use: tcpsend [-t timeout] host port [files]
-t timeout - try connecting for timeout seconds
tcpsend.c source code
I had success using lp with a hostname and port.
echo foobar | lp -h 10.10.13.37:9100 -
Without specifying a port, i would get
lp: Error - No default destination
If printing a PDF, you can first convert it to PostScript using pdf2ps
pdf2ps file.pdf - | lp -h 10.10.13.37:9100 -
The argument - is used as an alias for standard input or output, letting us pipe the output of postscript straight into standard input of lp.

How can I have tcpdump write to file and standard output the appropriate data?

I want to have tcpdump write raw packet data into a file and also display packet analysis into standard output as the packets are captured (by analysis I mean the lines it displays normally when -w is missing).
Can anybody please tell me how to do that?
Here's a neat way to do what you want:
tcpdump -w - -U | tee somefile | tcpdump -r -
What it does:
-w - tells tcpdump to write binary data to stdout
-U tells tcpdump to write each packet to stdout as it is received, rather than buffering them and outputting in chunks
tee writes that binary data to a file AND to its own stdout
-r - tells the second tcpdump to get its data from its stdin
Since tcpdump 4.9.3 4.99.0, the --print option can be used:
tcpdump -w somefile --print
Wednesday, December 30, 2020, by mcr#sandelman.ca, denis and fxl.
Summary for 4.99.0 tcpdump release
[...]
User interface:
[...]
Add --print, to cause packet printing even with -w.
tcpdump ${ARGS} &
PID=$!
tcpdump ${ARGS} -w ${filename}
kill $PID
If you want a way to do it without running tcpdump twice, consider:
sudo tcpdump port 80 -w $(tty) | tee /tmp/output.txt
From the interactive command prompt you could use $TTY instead of $(tty) but in a script the former wouldn't be set (though I'm not sure how common it is to run tcpdump in a script).
Side-note: it's not very Unix-y the way tcpdump by default makes you write to a file. Programs should by default write to stdout. Redirection to a file is already provided by the shell constructs. Maybe there's a good reason tcpdump is designed this way but I don't know what that is.

Bash Script Block All Apple Devices

I am trying to create a shell script to block all apple devices on my network. I am using nmap for os detection. What I have so far is this:
while (true) do
nmap -O -T4 -p 22,80 -v 172.20.0.0/24 | grep -B9 'OS details: Apple' | \
grep 'Nmap scan report for' | cut -f4 -d'r' | cut -f2 -d' ' | \
iptables -i wlan0 -A INPUT -j DROP -s
sleep 10
done
Is there a way to simplify this at all so there is less grepping and cutting involved?
Also, this script will run into errors if there are more than one or zero apple devices found on the network. Is it possible to add logic for that?
Yes, of course it is possible. You can use perl/awk to simplify the script a lot.
Also, I'm not sure that your script is correct at the moment.
You have a pipe that write addresses to iptables, but iptables
doesn't work this way.
If you want to run iptables for each address that is produced by nmap,
you can read the addresses using read to some variable (in my example ADDR)
and then use the variable in iptables:
while (true) do
nmap -O -T4 -p 22,80 -v 172.20.0.0/24 | grep -B9 'OS details: Apple' | \
grep 'Nmap scan report for' | cut -f4 -d'r' | cut -f2 -d' ' | \
while read ADDR
do
iptables -i wlan0 -A INPUT -j DROP -s $ADDR
done
sleep 10
done
A few more remarks:
You do not need the parenthesis around true. This starts a new subshell, which is inefficient. In this case, you probably won't care, but it's good practice to avoid needless subshells.
the $ADDR in Igor Chubin's answer is dangerous. If $ADDR contains a whitespace character, it will be split up into separate parameters. Someone on the network may be able to affect the output of NMap, and modify the structure of the iptables command. Even if this is not the case here, it's good practice to put the argument in between double quotes whenever possible to prevent this: "$ADDR".
for similar reasons, you'll usually want to use read -r instead of just read. Without the -r parameter, backslash characters in the input will escape subsequent special characters (such as spaces).
NMap has its own Lua scripting support. This is another way to go at this problem, which may prevent you from having to parse any text at all.
If you are physically on the same network, you may be able to block Apple devices without any NMap at all, by blocking devices based on the MAC address of the device. The first three bytes identify the organisation which issued the MAC address. You can look them up here. They can be faked on a rooted device, but then again, so can the NMap fingerprinting (though that would likely be harder).
An important part of scripting is understanding the programs you are using and how to get the appropriate output from them. It looks like you have a decent understanding of Nmap, since you limit the number of ports scanned (-p 22,80) and request OS detection (-O), but you could avoid a lot of text processing if you used the appropriate output format.
Nmap's "grepable" format is deprecated, meaning that it can't be used to get a lot of more-recent features' output, but it works just fine for OS detection. You request it with -oG. Here's an example, borrowing some looping help from #IgorChubin's excellent answer:
while (true) do
nmap -O -T4 -p 22,80 -oG - 172.20.0.0/24 | awk '/OS: Apple/{print $2}' | \
while read ADDR
do
iptables -i wlan0 -A INPUT -j DROP -s $ADDR
done
sleep 10
done
Some other improvements include moving the sleep 10 into the while condition of the outermost loop, to allow killing it with Ctrl-C during one of the sleeps. Also, be aware that DHCP leases expire, and the IP you are blocking may be assigned to a different system in the future. In general, this approach does not seem like the best way to accomplish what you want.

How to delay pipe netcat to connect on first input

Running in bash under Ubuntu:
I have a source that generates me some output, but not straight away. Let's assume it is a first netcat listening on a socket: netcat -l 12345.
And I would like to pipe it to an outgoing netcat (connecting over TCP), e.g. netcat -l 12345 | netcat localhost 54321. But the tricky bit is, that I know there is nothing listening for that incoming connection on localhost 54321 when I run the command, but I know there will be one when the first actual character arrives through the pipe.
So my question is: is there a way either:
to delay the execution of the outgoing netcat until the first character arrives into the pipe, or
to delay the outgoing netcat from trying to establish the TCP connection until it receives the first character on its standard input? (no straight option for that in man, switching to UDP is not acceptable)
Thanks in advance!
Edit: In reality, the source is more complex than a netcat, namely it is a listening netcat piped through all sort of stream modification.
Using the research you already did and that I commented to (by not knowing it was an answer to your own question), here is the full delayed_netcat.sh:
#!/bin/bash
read line
netcat "${#}" < <(echo $line ; cat)
This first waits for a line of input and later prepends that line using a simple echo to the "newly generated" input to the actual netcat. The rest of stdin is just redirected using cat which slurps it from stdin and adds it to the input of netcat. It also supports passing commandline options and arguments to the "real" netcat.
The usage is as follows:
netcat -l 12345 | cmd1 | cmd2 | ... | ./delayed_netcat.sh localhost 54321
The netcat is delayed till the first line is read. If you really want to start it after the first character is read the parts with read and echo need some rewrite.
Port Forwarding or Port Mapping with netcat:
ncat -l -p 12345 -c 'ncat localhost 54321'
Using socat:
socat TCP4-LISTEN:12345 TCP4:localhost:54321
This command exits after the first connection is done.
I have found an answer to my question, but it is awful... so still looking for something better.
netcat -l 12345 | gawk '(NR==1){print""}{print;fflush()}' | ./delayed_netcat.sh
where ./delayed_netcat.sh:
#!/bin/sh
read line
netcat localhost 12345
So the read line delays the netcat localhost 12345 by waiting for and consuming the first input line, and I use gawk '(NR==1){print""}{print;fflush()}' to insert an empty line just before the first record... I'm sure there is room for much improvement to that!

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