castline is a performance oriented and easy to use networking
swiss army knife a la nc. It's called castline because
netcrab sounded dumb, and transmitting packets to a host is like
fishing; you're hoping they bite.
I was inspired to write this project after reading more about nc
on Gordon Lyon's blog. The original nc was released in 1995;
and the last major release was in 1996. I downloaded the source
from there as a reference for this project.
castline is supported on Linux and MacOS; and what I mean by that
is that those are the only two systems I test on. If you are interested
in adding windows support though I am happy to review pull requests.
castline includes several major features from nc:
- Outbound or inbound connections; TCP or UDP; from any port
- Full DNS reverse/forward checking; with warnings
- Port-scanning abilities; built-in randomizer
- Loose source-routing capability
- Dummy packet generator
And some original features of it's own:
- General performance metrics:
- Time
- Memory
- Packet loss
- Port usage information:
- Which process uses what
- What are they doing
- Simple CLI:
- Subcommands instead of options (for the most part)
- Get only what you ask for
The original design idea for nc was simply a cat like utility for networks.
Given some port on a local machine, display all inbound/outbound information on
that port. Obviously nc does a bit more than that; and so does castline.
For the most part however, castline will only print what you ask for. In the case
where ou don't provide specifics, default values are used. These defaults
are described in the guide.
For details on how to use castline, see the guide.