Socat Stuff

Socat is a multi-purpose relay tool. It is a great tool for troubleshooting networking issues and can also be used to create on-the-fly networking connections, including TCP, UDP and SSL.

There are two areas of interest for me regarding Socat:

Socat/G is a patch for Socat to allow the use of OpenSSL proxy certificates.
Socat on Cygwin/Windows.

Socat on Cygwin/Windows

An initial port of Socat to Cygwin/Windows is easily made:

set up Cygwin
download and unpack the socat 1.6.0.1 tarball
Run
```
  ./configure
  make
```
With a few hacks in the socat test.sh script (and none in the source files !) I now get the following tests results:
```
  summary: 196 tests; 110 ok, 9 failed, 77 could not be performed
```
where most of the tests that could not be performed are due to missing IP6 support on my Windows XP laptop (I've simply not installed it) and some tests stating only on Linux.

Binaries

The folks at gentilkiwi are now hosting Windows ports of Socat: http://www.gentilkiwi.com/telechargements-s43-t-socat.htm#englishversion

A precompiled binary of the above step is available: socat-1.6.0.1-cygwin.bin.tar.gz
This tarball contains only the three socat executables that were compiled against Cygwin1.dll version 1.5.25:

  -rwxr-xr-x janjust/none  83542 2008-04-07 16:45:55 filan.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x janjust/none  74126 2008-04-07 16:45:55 procan.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x janjust/none 337489 2008-04-07 16:45:54 socat.exe

and is currently the only Windows version that includes proxy support.

TODO

Get most if not all tests up and running; named pipes will most likely never work;
Add tap-win32 support similar to tun support on the Linux side;
Take a stab at compiling the thing on MSys/MingW ...

Share and enjoy....

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