Does anyone remove netcat from their environment?
Our security team likes to have netcat removed from SLES 9, however, the yast2 rpm depends on netcat. I am interested to know what functionalities I may lose in administrating the systems. I understand I will not be able to use yast, but I think I can manually update the config files, and do most of everything in command line, right?
Thank you. RBW
What I don't understand quite is what the benefit would be from removing the netcat program/package. It takes about 10 lines of C code to listen on a network socket, and if you have intruded a system, you'll be able to to things independently from the presence of a netcat program. In addition to that: Try netcat -lp 20000 | tar xfvvp - on the target system (here called t200), then run (on the sender system): tar cfvv - some_files_you_want_to_be_transferred > /dev/tcp/t200/20000 and watch the probably fastest file transfer on a linux system in action. You have to be using a bash on the sender system for the /dev/tcp function, which is a bash feature. Means: It's not so easy to get rif of the useful functions of a linux system. Roman.