RE: Ncat: Update and Feature Request

 > 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

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