Generic TCP Server

Generic TCP Server

HTTP, FTP and TFTP do not make the whole world of TCP. When you come to debugging networks you may need more basic tools. This is the purpose of this tool.

Features

• This tool will send a response (a file or a typed text) when a certain condition is met with the incoming client connection:
  • Timeout
  • Count threshold
  • Pattern matching
• Multi-column transaction traces

What this tool does not do

• True LDAP listener (though it could be worked around with a custom binary file containing the LDAP response)
• Regular expression for pattern matching

Usage

In order to start the server you must provide 3 things:

1. The response that the server will send to the client. This can be any arbitrary file (e.g. an HTML page but also a binary file) or a typed text.
2. A condition to be met to send the response. There are three sorts of conditions:
   • Timeout: the response is sent after a certain amount of milliseconds
   • Count threshold: the response is sent after the server has received a given number of bytes
   • Pattern matching: the response is sent after a certain string has been received
3. Tell if the connection will be closed by the server after it has sent the response.

Then just click the "Start Server" button and you're done.

Note: The server sends the response only once per connection. If you decide to keep the connection open after the response has been sent, the response will not be sent again even if the client sends again characters that would trigger again the condition.

A short history of this tool

I first developed this tool to test server configuration and network routes. I used it as a server-side tool with simple OS commands for instance to see if the load balancing was working correctly before installing the final servers. I found it quite convenient so I thought some other people could need it. I also developed a tiny LDAP listener able to respond to bind requests but it is not embedded yet.