How to check if the service and the server is available? - linux

I would like to check if given server is online and given service is active -- or maybe even simpler, if given port is open.
Something like this:
port_check my_server 22
or
service_check my_server ssh
And I would get a binary answer -- yes/no, meaning everything is OK, or there is no connection (server is down, or the service is not active).
I have to run this tool from ordinary user account (non-root). The question is -- what is the tool? Thank you in advance for help.
Edit: please note, I have to get binary answer, which means any interactive tool, or tool that tries to log in first is no good. It should be basically a ping but for any service.

telnet is that tool. check.sh
#!/bin/sh
telnet -e / $1 $2 <<END
/
close
END
echo $?
running - check.sh localhost <port>
Note that the service listening the port will be touched.

you can also try nmap tool.
the simplest way to use it is nmap -p$2 $1 but you can alternatively specify a port or even a host range to check.

Related

How to hide telnet connection logs from getting printed in screen

I have a script which telnet to remote system & user can interact with remote system. But i want to hide telnet connection logs from getting printed for security reasons. I tried all the redirection techniques like (> , 1>, 2>), but my purpose is not served. "1>" is not allowing to interact with remote system.
How to redirect/hide only telnet connection logs (or first 3 connection lines) below & make telnet session interactive ?
script :
#!/bin/bash
telnet 1.2.3.4 7777
sample issue execution :
~/redirect.sh
Trying 1.2.3.4... // redirect
Connected to 1.2.3.4.
Escape character is '^]'.
login:
sample expected execution :
~/redirect.sh
login:
There is no easy fix for this, as those three lines are simply printf() in the code. It would be a great deal of effort to remove those lines and allow interactive connections.
However, it is a simple client side change to modify the telnet client source and recompiling:
Download inetutils-2.3 from here.
Extract with tar -xJvf inetutils-2.3.tar.xz.
cd inetutils-2.3.
./configure
Use the patch in this answer: patch telnet/commands.c < /path/to/telnet.patch
patching file telnet/commands.c
make
Then test:
2>/dev/null ./telnet/telnet 192.168.100.1 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_8.6
Copy this version of telnet into your PATH somewhere. Possibly rename it stelnet.

How to run ssh over an existing TCP connection

I want to be able to SSH to a number linux devices at once, behind different NATs. I can't configure the network that they are on. However, I'm having trouble getting ssh to go over an existing connection.
I have full control over both my client and the devices. Here's the process so far:
On my client, I first run
socat TCP-LISTEN:5001,pktinfo,fork EXEC:./create_socket.sh,fdin=3,fdout=4,nofork
Contents of ./create_socket.sh:
ssh -N -M -S "~/sockets/${SOCAT_PEERADDR}" -o "ProxyCommand=socat - FD:3!!FD:4" "root#${SOCAT_PEERADDR}"
On the device, I'm running
socat TCP:my_host:4321 TCP:localhost:22
However, nothing comes in or out of FD:3!!FD:4, I assume because the ProxyCommand is a subprocess. I've also tried setting fdin=3,fdout=3 and changing ./create_socket.sh to:
ssh -N -M -S "~/sockets/${SOCAT_PEERADDR}" -o "ProxyUseFdpass=yes" -o "ProxyCommand=echo 3" "root#${host}"
This prints an error:
mm_receive_fd: no message header
proxy dialer did not pass back a connection
I believe this is because the fd should be sent in some way using sendmsg, but the fd doesn't originate from the subprocess anyways. I'd like to make it as simple as possible, and this feels close to workable.
You want to turn the client/server model on its head and make a generic server to spawn a client on-demand and in-response-to an incoming unauthenticated TCP connection from across a network boundary, and then tell that newly-spawned client to use that unauthenticated TCP session. I think that may have security considerations that you haven't thought of. If a malicious person spams connections to your computer, your computer will spawn a lot of SSH instances to connect back and these processes can take up a lot of local system resources while authenticating. You're effectively trying to set up SSH to automatically connect to an untrusted (unverified) remote-initiated machine across a network boundary. I can't stress how dangerous that could be for your client computer. Using the wrong options could expose any credentials you have or even give a malicious person full access to your machine.
It's also worth noting that the scenario you're asking to do, building a tunnel between multiple devices to multiplex additional connections across an untrusted network boundary, is exactly the purpose of VPN software. Yes, SSH can build tunnels. VPN software can build tunnels better. The concept would be that you'd run a VPN server on your client machine. The VPN server will create a new (virtual) network interface which represents only your devices. The devices would connect to the VPN server and be assigned an IP address. Then, from the client machine, you'd just initiate SSH to the device's VPN address and it will be routed over the virtual network interface and arrive at the device and be handled by its SSH daemon server. Then you don't need to muck around with socat or SSH options for port forwarding. And you'd get all the tooling and tutorials that exist around VPNs. I strongly encourage you to look at VPN software.
If you really want to use SSH, then I strongly encourage you to learn about securing SSH servers. You've stated that the devices are across network boundaries (NAT) and that your client system is unprotected. I'm not going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot but it would be very easy to spectacularly do so in the situation you've stated. If you're in a work setting, you should talk to your system administrators to discuss firewall rules, bastion hosts, stuff like that.
Yes, you can do what you've stated. I strongly advise caution though. I advise it strongly enough that I won't suggest anything which would work with that as stated. I will suggest a variant with the same concepts but more authentication.
First, you've effectively set up your own SSH bounce server but without any of the common tooling compatible with SSH servers. So that's the first thing I'd fix: use SSH server software to authenticate incoming tunnel requests by using ssh client software to initiate the connection from the device instead of socat. ssh already has plenty of capabilities to create tunnels in both directions and you get authentication bundled with it (with socat, there's no authentication). The devices should be able to authenticate using encryption keys (ssh calls these identities). You'll need to connect once manually from the device to verify and authorize the remote encryption key fingerprint. You'll also need to copy the public key file (NOT the private key file) to your client machine and add it to your authorized_keys files. You can ask for help on that separately if you need it.
A second issue is that you appear to be using fd3 and fd4. I don't know why you're doing that. If anything, you should be using fd0 and fd1 since these are stdin and stdout, respectively. But you don't even need to do that if you're using socat to initiate a connection. Just use - where stdin and stdout are meant. It should be completely compatible with -o ProxyCommand without specifying any file descriptors. There's an example at the end of this answer.
The invocation from the device side might look like this (put it into a script file):
IDENTITY=/home/WavesAtParticles/.ssh/tunnel.id_rsa # on device
REMOTE_SOCKET=/home/WavesAtParticles/.ssh/$(hostname).sock # on client
REMOTEUSER=WavesAtParticles # on client
REMOTEHOST=remotehost # client hostname or IP address accessible from device
while true
do
echo "$(date -Is) connecting"
#
# Set up your SSH tunnel. Check stderr for known issues.
ssh \
-i "${IDENTITY}" \
-R "${REMOTE_SOCKET}:127.0.0.1:22" \
-o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes \
-o PasswordAuthentication=no \
-o IdentitiesOnly=yes \
-l "${REMOTEUSER}" \
"${REMOTEHOST}" \
"sleep inf" \
2> >(
read -r line
if echo "${line}" | grep -q "Error: remote port forwarding failed"
then
ssh \
-i "${IDENTITY}" \
-o PasswordAuthentication=no \
-o IdentitiesOnly=yes \
-l "${REMOTEUSER}" \
"${REMOTEHOST}" \
"rm ${REMOTE_SOCKET}" \
2>/dev/null # convince me this is wrong
echo "$(date -Is) removed stale socket"
fi
#
# Re-print stderr to the terminal
>&2 echo "${line}" # the stderr line we checked
>&2 cat - # and any unused stderr messages
)
echo "disconnected"
sleep 30
done
Remember, copying and pasting is bad in terms of shell scripts. At a minimum, I recommend you read man ssh and man ssh_config, and to check the script against shellcheck.net. The intent of the script is:
In a loop, have your device (re)connect to your client to maintain your tunnel.
If the connection drops or fails, then reconnect every 30 seconds.
Run ssh with the following parameters:
-i "${IDENTITY}": specify a private key to use for authentication.
-R "${REMOTE_SOCKET}:127.0.0.1:22": specify a connection request forwarder which accept connections on the Remote side /home/WavesAtParticles/$(hostname).sock then forward them to the local side by connecting to 127.0.0.1:22.
-o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes: if the remote side fails to set up the connection forwarder, then the local side should emit an error and die (and we check for this error in a subshell).
-o PasswordAuthentication=no: do not fall back to a password request, particularly since the local user isn't here to type it in
-o IdentitiesOnly=yes: do not use any default identity nor any identity offered by any local agent. Use only the one specified by -i.
-l "${REMOTEUSER}": log in as the specified user.
remotehost, eg your client machine that you want a device to connect to.
Sleep forever
If the connection failed because of a stale socket, then work around the issue by:
Log in separately
Delete the (stale) socket
Print today's date indicating when it was deleted
Loop again
There's an option which is intended to make this error-handling redundant: StreamLocalBindUnlink. However the option does not correctly work and has a bug open for years. I imagine that's because there really aren't many people who use ssh to forward over unix domain sockets. It's annoying but not difficult to workaround.
Using a unix domain socket should limit connectivity to whoever can reach the socket file (which should be only you and root if it's placed in your ${HOME}/.ssh directory and the directory has correct permissions). I don't know if that's important for your case or not.
On the other hand you can also simplify this a lot if you're willing to open a TCP port on 127.0.0.1 for each device. But then any other user on the same system can also connect. You should specifically listen on 127.0.0.1 which would then only accept connections from the same host to prevent external machines from reaching the forwarding port. You'd change the ${REMOTE_SOCKET} variable to, for example, 127.0.0.1:4567 to listen on port 4567 and only accept local connections. So you'd lose the named socket capability and permit any other user on the client machine to connect to your device, but gain a much simpler tunnel script (because you can remove the whole bit about parsing stderr to remove a stale socket file).
As long as your device is online (can reach your workstation's incoming port) and is running that script, and the authentication is valid, then the tunnel should also be online or coming-online. It will take some time to recover after a loss (and restore) of network connectivity, though. You can tune that with ConnectTimeout, TCPKeepAlive, and ServerAliveInterval options and the sleep 30 part of the loop. You could run it in a tmux session to keep it going even when you don't have a login session running. You could also run it as a system service on the device to bring it online even after recovering from a power failure.
Then from your client, you can connect in reverse:
ssh -o ProxyCommand='socat - unix-connect:/home/WavesAtParticles/remotehost.sock' -l WavesAtParticles .
In this invocation, you'll start ssh. It will then set up the proxycommand using socat. It will take its stdin/stdout and relay it through a connected AF_UNIX socket at the path provided. You'll need to update the path for the remote host you expect. But there's no need to specify file descriptors at all.
If ssh complains:
2019/08/26 18:09:52 socat[29914] E connect(5, AF=1 "/home/WavesAtParticles/remotehost.sock", 7): Connection refused
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
then the tunnel is currently down and you should investigate the remotehost device's connectivity.
If you use the remote forwarding option with a TCP port listening instead of a unix domain socket, then the client-through-tunnel-to-remote invocation becomes even easier: ssh -p 4567 WavesAtParticles#localhost.
Again, you're trying to invert the client/server model and I don't think that's a very good idea to do with SSH.
I’m going to try this today:
http://localhost.run/
It seems like what you are looking for.
Not to answer your question but helpful for people who may not know:
Ngrok is the easiest way I’ve found. they do webservers as well as tcp connections. I’d recommend installing it through homebrew.
https://ngrok.com/product
$ ngrok http 5000
In the terminal for http, 5000 being the port of your application.
$ ngrok tcp 5000
In the terminal for tcp.
It’s free for testing(random changing domains).
For tcp connections remove “http://“ from the web address to get the IP address. Sorry I can’t remember. I think the client ports to 80 and I believe you can change that by adding port 5001 or something, google it to double check

How can I find available but unoccupied ports on a Linux box?

Specifically RHEL 6.5
It's a Dev box and we have certain port ranges we are permitted for development use.
...unfortunately, getting a tech's attention to find out what ports are available is like pulling teeth. Would prefer a script or alias that does this so that we don't have to ask all the time. Clues? Is this an iptables command or is it a netstat command or some weird combo? nmap is not available on this machine.
Please don't say this is a Server Fault question. They say it's a programming question. :-|
Definitely a SF question but here we go. From the dev box itself (command line) you should be able to see what ports are in use with the netstat tool.
To see the list of listening ports both UDP and TCP, complete with the program names:
# preferably as root
netstat --listening --program --numeric-ports --protocol=ip -6 -4
From another machine, you can use nmap or a similar tool to see what ports are open/listening by scanning the IP address assigned to the dev box. Before trying this, maybe you should ask for permission. Also, you should consider that the box in question might have firewall rules in place that can thwart your scanning attempts.
To see what firewall rules are in place in the dev box try:
# as root
iptables -nvxL -t filter
# maybe there are NAT rules, redirects to other addresses, etc.
iptables -nvxL -t nat
To see what these iptables options do, try man iptables.
As an example, assuming 172.16.0.1 is the IP address assigned to the dev box, to run nmap in the simplest way possible:
# preferably as root
nmap -v 172.16.0.1
In a few minutes you should see a list of ports/services listening in that relevant box.
Try man nmap and read the documentation for more details.
If you really think this is a programming issue, you can use the netcat tool and program a simple script to do something roughly equivalent to what nmap does.
#!/bin/bash
#
# DISCLAIMER: NOT TESTED -- just an example
# NOTE: This will take many DAYS to complete
HOST=172.16.0.1
for port in `seq 1 65535`
do
echo "Trying ${port}..."
netcat -vvv ${HOST} $port -w 1 -z
done
For every open TCP port you should see a line similar to this:
Connection to 172.16.0.1 23 port [tcp/telnet] succeeded!

linux execute command remotely

how do I execute command/script on a remote linux box?
say I want to do service tomcat start on box b from box a.
I guess ssh is the best secured way for this, for example :
ssh -OPTIONS -p SSH_PORT user#remote_server "remote_command1; remote_command2; remote_script.sh"
where the OPTIONS have to be deployed according to your specific needs (for example, binding to ipv4 only) and your remote command could be starting your tomcat daemon.
Note:
If you do not want to be prompt at every ssh run, please also have a look to ssh-agent, and optionally to keychain if your system allows it. Key is... to understand the ssh keys exchange process. Please take a careful look to ssh_config (i.e. the ssh client config file) and sshd_config (i.e. the ssh server config file). Configuration filenames depend on your system, anyway you'll find them somewhere like /etc/sshd_config. Ideally, pls do not run ssh as root obviously but as a specific user on both sides, servers and client.
Some extra docs over the source project main pages :
ssh and ssh-agent
man ssh
http://www.snailbook.com/index.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/OpenSSH/Configuring
keychain
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/keychain-guide.xml
an older tuto in French (by myself :-) but might be useful too :
http://hornetbzz.developpez.com/tutoriels/debian/ssh/keychain/
ssh user#machine 'bash -s' < local_script.sh
or you can just
ssh user#machine "remote command to run"
If you don't want to deal with security and want to make it as exposed (aka "convenient") as possible for short term, and|or don't have ssh/telnet or key generation on all your hosts, you can can hack a one-liner together with netcat. Write a command to your target computer's port over the network and it will run it. Then you can block access to that port to a few "trusted" users or wrap it in a script that only allows certain commands to run. And use a low privilege user.
on the server
mkfifo /tmp/netfifo; nc -lk 4201 0</tmp/netfifo | bash -e &>/tmp/netfifo
This one liner reads whatever string you send into that port and pipes it into bash to be executed. stderr & stdout are dumped back into netfifo and sent back to the connecting host via nc.
on the client
To run a command remotely:
echo "ls" | nc HOST 4201

Simple Socket Server in Bash?

Is there a way to quickly bind to a TCP port/ip address and simply print out all information to STDOUT? I have a simple debugging solution which writes things to 127.0.0.1:4444 and I'd like to be able to simply bind up a port from bash and print everything that comes across. Is there an easy way to do this?
$ nc -k -l 4444 > filename.out
see nc(1)
Just because you asked how to do it in bash, though netcat answer is very valid:
$ exec 3<>/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/4444
$ cat <&3
That is working as you expecting:
nc -k -l 4444 |bash
and then you
echo "ls" >/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/4444
then you see the listing performed by bash.
[A Brief Security Warning]
Of course if you leave a thing like this running on your computer, you have a wide open gateway for all kinds of attacks because commands can be sent from any user account on any host in your network. This implements no security (authentication, identification) whatsoever and sends all transmitted commands unencrypted over the network, so it can very easily be abused.
Adding an answer using ncat that #Freedom_Ben alluded to:
ncat -k -l 127.0.0.1 4444
and explanation of options from man ncat:
-k, --keep-open Accept multiple connections in listen mode
-l, --listen Bind and listen for incoming connections

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