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Ha! This was probably the first serious problem I ever tackled with an open source contribution! The year was 2002, the 2.4 Linux kernel had just been released

Ha! This was probably the first serious problem I ever tackled with an open source contribution! The year was 2002, the 2.4 Linux kernel had just been released and I was making money on the side building monitoring software for a few thousand (mostly Solaris) hosts owned by a large German car manufacturer. Everything was built in parallel ksh code, “deployed” to Solaris 8 on Sun E10Ks, and mostly kicked off by cron. Keeping total script runtime down to avoid process buildup and delay was critical. The biggest offender: long timeouts for host/port combinations that would sporadically not be available. Eventually, I grabbed W. Richard Stevens’ UNIX network programming book and created tcping [0]. FreeBSD, NetBSD, a series of Linux distros picked it up at the time and it was steady decline from there… good times! [0]: https://github.com/mkirchner/tcping https://github.com/mkirchner/tcping edit: grammar

macintux 3y ago
RIP WRS. Such a fantastic book.
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gwright 3y ago
I worked for Rich when he was writing UNP. Seeing comments like this 30+ years later reminds me how fortunate I was to spend time with him early in my career.
kennu 3y ago
Awesome, I think I had the same book in 1990s. Things were so simple back then, when the default approach to anything was to start writing some C code with socket calls.
AceyMan 3y ago
The syntax is different and I don't remember who compiles the binaries, but as a primarily Windows sysadmin, tcping is literally the first thing I put in my %PATH% on a new jumpbox; even ahead of dig, believe it or not. (After that it's Russinovich's sysinternala suite.)
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
When I was reading his books I used the utility he wrote, sock. https://github.com/keyou/sock https://github.com/keyou/sock
Levitating 3y ago
How is this different from just using netcat? Netcat even has port scanning capabilities.

macintux 3y ago

RIP WRS. Such a fantastic book.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gwright 3y ago

I worked for Rich when he was writing UNP. Seeing comments like this 30+ years later reminds me how fortunate I was to spend time with him early in my career.

kennu 3y ago

Awesome, I think I had the same book in 1990s. Things were so simple back then, when the default approach to anything was to start writing some C code with socket calls.

AceyMan 3y ago

The syntax is different and I don't remember who compiles the binaries, but as a primarily Windows sysadmin, tcping is literally the first thing I put in my %PATH% on a new jumpbox; even ahead of dig, believe it or not. (After that it's Russinovich's sysinternala suite.)

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

When I was reading his books I used the utility he wrote, sock. https://github.com/keyou/sock https://github.com/keyou/sock

Levitating 3y ago

How is this different from just using netcat? Netcat even has port scanning capabilities.