Subject: Re: Proposal for new utility in base: bin/nc
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/13/2001 20:02:47
>> It's already in pkgsrc/net/netcat btw.
> Which, aside from being unmaintainable and not IPv6-ready, doesn't
> help me since it's not in base.

I suspect you won't get anywhere with this; NetBSD is very resistant to
adding anything that makes life easier for humans trying to admin their
machines by hand.

> Like i said, the first thing i do upon unpacking the base tarball on
> a new system is get an nc binary onto the system for grabbing
> everything else.  Dealing with floppies is painful.

Well, aside from the pkg stuff, if you trust it enough to use it, you
could do what I've done a few times:

already-installed-machine% uuencode foo < `which nc` | nc 12345

new-machine% script
new-machine% telnet already-installed-machine 12345
....
new-machine% exit
Script done, ...
new-machine% uudecode -p < typescript > nc
new-machine% chmod 755 nc

(I've actually frequently transferred the source instead, because often
"already-installed-machine" is not binary-compatible with
"new-machine".)

Not nearly as painful as floppies.  (It does require a working network
to already-installed-machine, but netcat isn't much use without a
network to start with.)

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