NetKraken

NetKraken is a Network connectivity tester inspired by nc, ncat and the netcats of the world.

🚧 work in progress 🚧

Goals

1. Rapidly prove which of the trinity of evil (Network/Firewall/DNS) is causing connectivity issues
2. Async all the things for massive concurrency
3. Cross platform support, with Windows as a first class citizen

Current Features

• TCP/UDP Client/Server
• HTTP Client
• DNS Client
• ICMP Client
• Asynchronous servers allowing for large amounts of client connections
• Asynchronous clients allow for simultaneous connections to multiple destinations

Planned Features

• HTTP Server
• TCP/UDP traceroute
• Latency, Jitter, Bandwidth measurement

Installation

Install the package for your system from the github release page here

Usage

nk --help
NetKraken - Cross platform network connectivity tester

Usage: nk <COMMAND>

Commands:
  config  Generate a NetKraken config
  dns     DNS connection
  http    HTTP connection
  https   HTTPS connection
  icmp    ICMP connection
  tcp     TCP connection
  udp     UDP connection
  help    Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Troubleshooting

ICMP

On linux, the ICMP client needs to either run as sudo or, the nk binary needs cap_net_raw permissions, which allows it create raw sockets.

This will allow regular users to use the ICMP client without using sudo.

sudo setcap cap_net_raw=ep /path/to/nk

• cap_net_raw - The capability that allows sending raw network packets.
• ep - The capability is in the effective and permitted sets.

If not, you will get the following error:

Operation not permitted (os error 1)

You can check the current permissions with the following command:

getcap /path/to/nk

Testing

Using ncat as a server.

TCP Server

ncat -l -k -v 127.0.0.1 8080 --sh-exec "echo ''"

UDP Server

ncat -l -u -k -v 127.0.0.1 8080 --sh-exec "echo ''"