Ngrep is another awesome tool that is a networking equivalent of a common UNIX utility (although a more loose one in this case): http://ngrep.sourceforge.net/

Ngrep is another awesome tool that is a networking equivalent of a common UNIX utility (although a more loose one in this case): http://ngrep.sourceforge.net/ http://ngrep.sourceforge.net/ Also +1 for socat as a netcat replacement, having SSL there when needed is really helpful. I use it a lot for testing when developing network applications, replacing one end point with a fixed set of responses or even typing stuff in interactively etc.