Portela — a simple port listener

Portela samba school, RJ Brasil

During network connectivity troubleshooting, one thing that always pops up is the need to test connectivity for certain ports, for example, to check if a firewall is blocking a certain port,

I usually spin up a port on a server using either Netcat or Python, ie

while true ; do nc -l -p 8300 -c 'echo -e "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\ $(date)"' ; done

using Python2

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8330

But what if you need to open this port on a particluar network interface? You can do something like this:

python  -c 'import BaseHTTPServer as bhs, SimpleHTTPServer as shs;  bhs.HTTPServer(("192.168.20.10", 8330),  shs.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler).serve_forever()'

or again, the amazing Netcat swiss army knife

nc -l 192.168.20.10 8330

I wanted to replicate the simple Netcat utility using Python, but make it even more easier syntax-wise, while also giving it the ability to bind to network interface names, rather than IP address

Portela

Portela is a simple port listener that is Python 2/3 compatible.

It has zero dependencies.

You can replicate netcat functionality but also have the ability to bind to interfaces using names, and daemonize the process.

Installation

pip install portela 

Usage

portela 1234 // spin up a listener on port 1234
portela 1234 -i eth1 // spins up on port 1234 on interface ‘eth1’
portela 1234 -i eth1 -d // spins up on port 1234 on interface ‘eth1’ and run as daemon
portela 1234 -m “samba magic” // spins up on port 1234 and return a message on HTTP call
portela stop // stops all instances of portela listener
portela status // check if portela is running as daemon
portela help / -h / — help // prints this message

Give it a try.