Inetutils – traditional networking utilities and servers

Inetutils is a collection of traditional networking clients, servers and administrative utilities.

It brings together familiar programs for testing connectivity, inspecting network configuration, transferring files, querying remote services and providing classic network daemons. The individual utilities were originally derived from the 4.4BSD-Lite2 distribution, although a number have since been substantially rewritten.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Includes ping and ping6 for checking reachability and measuring network response times.
• Trace packet routes to remote hosts with traceroute.
• Query WHOIS databases from the command line with whois.
• Inspect and configure network interfaces with ifconfig.
• Display or change the system host name with hostname, and report the DNS domain name with dnsdomainname.
• Send messages to the system log with logger and provide system logging services with syslogd.
• Includes FTP and TFTP clients together with the corresponding ftpd and tftpd servers.
• Provides telnet and telnetd for interactive remote sessions on systems and networks where these legacy protocols are required.
• Offers the traditional rsh, rlogin and rexec remote-access programs and their server counterparts, together with rcp for remote file copying.
• Includes inetd, the internet super-server used to launch network services on demand.
• Provides talk and talkd for text communication between users.
• Supports both IPv4 and IPv6 across relevant utilities.
• Version 2.8 strengthens telnet and telnetd security, including fixes for authentication bypass, environment-variable handling and a stack-buffer vulnerability.
• Includes common GNU command-line options such as –help and –version across the suite.
• Can be built on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, providing portable implementations of established networking commands.

Website: gnu.org/software/inetutils
Support:
Developer: GNU Project
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Inetutils is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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