I’m writing a Python script which connects to remote hosts over a (super complicated) SOCKS/SSL tunnel. I am able to establish connections to IPs in a remote intranet on any port.
What I’m hoping to do is set up this python script to use IP addresses in the local loopback range (127.0.x.x) to become (maybe with the help of the hosts file) a ‘replica’ of the remote systems, and hence enable me to use applications which don’t support proxies. The problem is that I don’t always know what ports they’re trying to connect to. It seems the only way to work this out is to bind sockets to all 65536 ports, which seems a little crazy. So two questions:
- Is it crazy? Can I just set up a python list of sockets from 1-65536?
- Or is there a better way I should be doing this? Can I monitor connections to an IP somehow and bind the ports just before they’re needed?
I want to avoid using too much platform-dependent or non-python code if possible.
EDIT: To clarify, I’m only writing the client here – I have no control over the server. Believe me, if I had control over the server side of it I would not be doing it with SOCKS/SSL/CRAM 🙂
What about going lower level and interfacing a library designed for network analyzers like pycap?
This way you could detect all connection attempts and find the ports that you need to expose or may be you can just route the packets directly assuming the library in addition to packet detection can also do packet injection (pypcap page says this feature is experimental).
This would IMO make sense in python only for slow applications however…
Pycap seems to be developed for linux, but the core capturing is done by libpcap and for windows there is a similar library winpcap.