File Tunnel
Infrastructure
network tunneling
SHOW HN2024
180points
37comments
#443of 3,515 in 2024
Top 13%of 2024 by points
How HN took it
CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments
1 positive, 12 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 1 critical, out of 14 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.
Idea: 1 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Commenters find the approach clever and interesting
From 2 comments
This is utterly mind blowing.
aeonik on HNThere's a more complete version of this with nncp: https://www.complete.org/nncp/
rakoo on HN
Objections
Commenters question how it differs from netcat with mkfifo
From 3 comments
What's the benefit of this over netcat + mkfifo?
bawolff on HN``` mkfifo /mnt/shared/connection nc localhost 12345 > /mnt/shared/connection < /mnt/shared/connection ``` Seems the same?
zamadatix on HNnetcat+mkfifo does the actual transfer with TCP - so there's no tunneling involved. This solution tunnels tcp through file abstraction, so it works significantly differently. As…
lambdaxyzw on HN
Requests
Suggest using native named pipes or virtual channels instead of a file
From 2 comments
I think you can use named pipes if you are using SMB. Here is a example code in python (not tested). import socket import win32pipe import win32file import sys BUFFER_SIZE = 4096…
jclarkcom on HNFor RDP you can use virtual channels so you don't need to use a file over drive redirection
resoluteteeth on HN
Questions
How do the two sides coordinate reads and writes on the shared file
From 2 comments
So there’s multiple writers to the file? How is this arbitrated? Also how does either side know when the file has been updated?
andrewstuart on HNIt looks like one file per direction, and this is a point to point connection. It looks like each side just reads to the end of the file and then tries to read more to see if any…
jandrese on HN
Alternatives named
netcat with mkfifo
From 2 comments
What's the benefit of this over netcat + mkfifo?
bawolff on HN``` mkfifo /mnt/shared/connection nc localhost 12345 > /mnt/shared/connection < /mnt/shared/connection ``` Seems the same?
zamadatix on HN
nncp
From 1 comment
There's a more complete version of this with nncp: https://www.complete.org/nncp/
rakoo on HN
rdp2tcp
From 1 comment
Cool. I think rdp2tcp uses virtual channels for tunneling: https://rdp2tcp.sourceforge.net/
fiddyschmitt on HN