In this short lesson, I want to tell you about an amazing utility, NC, which is short for
Netcat.
So NC can be used, they call it the Swiss army knife of networking, by the way.
What I like about NC is that you can use it for quick tests.
So use NC 192.168.29.142.80, for instance, to see if port 80 is currently available.
Connection refused, or 22, well, look at that.
You can see that port 22, we have an answer from an SSH service.
That offers lots of options, and you can use many of them to filter what exactly you want
to do.
It's kind of the polite alternative to the Nmap utility.
You can use protocols, specifiers, and much more.
What I'm using it for is basically to check if certain ports are available, especially
if you are analyzing complex stuff that runs on your network, and you know that someone
in the middle should be answering on port 6443.
Well, use Netcat on port 6443 to check if that is available.
So the basic use, NC followed by the IP address.
So let's check on 146 on port 32175, and oh boy, connection is refused.
So Netcat, my favorite utility if I want to verify that a certain service is offering
its services at a specific port.