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Sending and receiving TCP/UDP packets using Netcat

This story will show you how to use Netcat to send and receive TCP/UDP packets.
We’ll focus on a specific example… we’ll simulate a Statsd client/server.

What is Netcat? Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol. Designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool, Netcat can be used directly with other programs and scripts to send files from a client to a server and back. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool that can specify the network parameters while also establishing a connection to a remote host via a tunnel.

Although Netcat can do many things, its main purpose and most desirable functions are to:

  1. Create an initial socket to establish a connection from the server to the client.
  2. Once connected, Netcat will automatically generate a second socket to transmit files from the server to the client and visa versa.

Netcat version

There are several, and incompatible, Netcat implementations. I believe Linux has the most advanced implementation but, unfortunately, I am on MacOS Catalina 10.15.6. So I used netcat 0.7.1 installed through homebrew. Actually, MacOS already provides a netcat implementation (i.e. /usr/bin/nc) that I honestly don’t like.

Test your Netcat understanding as a client-server

Open two computer terminals, the first will act as the server and the second will be the client.

Simulate the server

With Netcat, your computer can be converted into a fake server.
Focus to the server terminal, you want to start at port 8125/UDP, so issue:

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$ netcat -ulzp 8125

The server is now up and listening.

Simulate the client

In addition, we can use netcat to connect to the port (8125) recently opened.
Switch to the client terminal and send a message to 8125/UDP:

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echo "my-app.node.timer:102522|ms" | netcat -nuc 127.0.0.1 8125

Now you should see the fake metric my-app.node.timer:102522|ms sent by the client in the output of the fake server.