TCP Connection
The TCP Connection plugin turns IO Ninja into a raw TCP terminal, allowing you to connect to network nodes, send custom packets, and analyze responses. It lets you prepare packets in binary mode with a hex editor and provides detailed logging and transmission capabilities. You can also configure aspects of the TCP socket, such as the local interface, port, Nagle’s algorithm, and how connections are closed. This makes it a practical tool for exploring network behavior and testing TCP communication.
Capabilities
Recommended
| Enables the script pane and packet templates. |
Optional
| Required for establishing IPv6 connections. |
Basic Setup
- In IO Ninja, click the “New Session” dropdown and select “TCP Connection”.
- Set your target address/port and click “Connect”.
- Use the “Transmit” pane to craft a custom packet, and then press send.
- Adjust settings as needed via the “Settings” button (see “Settings” section below for details).
Settings
| Setting | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Remote address | Remote address to connect to. Can be specified via IPv4 (127.0.0.1), IPv6 (::1), or a domain name (localhost). Remote address can be suffixed with the remote port after a colon, e.g. ioninja.com:443. |
|
| Remote port (default) | Remote port to connect to in cases when a port is not explicitly specified in Remote address. | 80 |
| Reconnect | Attempt to reconnect when connection is dropped by the remote node. | False |
| Reconnect timeout | The delay between reconnect attempts. | 3000 |
| Use local address | Bind socket to the specified local address. | False |
| Adapter | Local network adapter to bind to. Pick one from the list of installed network adapters (or bind to all installed IP4 or all IP6 adapters at once). |
Auto |
| Local port | Local port to bind to. Setting this to 0 auto-selects an available port. |
8080 |
| Reuse address | Allow multiple sockets to share the same local address. Maps to the SO_REUSEADDR socket option. Please note, the support and details of implementation for this option are highly platform-specific. |
False |
| TCP Nagle algorithm | Delay transmission to reduce the number of small TCP packets. Maps to the TCP_NODELAY socket option. |
False |
| TCP reset | Drop TCP connections abruptly with a TCP RST packet. Maps to the SO_LINGER socket option. |
False |
| TCP keep-alives | Detect connection loss with TCP keep-alive probes. Maps to the TCP_KEEPALIVE socket option. |
False |
Read parallelism
(Windows-only)
|
Maximum number of read requests to issue in parallel. Having more than one pending read at a time helps with increasing read throughput when incoming data arrives in rapid streams (after filling one user buffer, the kernel can immediately switch to the next one without any waiting). Increasing this number beyond 4 usually won’t yield any extra performance gains. | 4 |
| Read block size (B) | The size of each individual read block submitted to the underlying transport. | 4KB |
| RX buffer size (B) | The full size of the incoming data (RX) buffer. Affects read throughput. | 16KB |
| TX buffer size (B) | The full size of the outbound data (TX) buffer. Affects write throughput. | 16KB |
| Keep read block size | Don’t merge read blocks in RX buffer. Incoming data blocks coming in quick succession can be merged together so that IO Ninja writes them to log as a whole. When this option is set to True, blocks are written to the log without merging, i.e., exactly as they are received from the underlying transport. |
False |
| Keep write block size | Don’t merge write blocks in TX buffer. Outbound data blocks sent in quick succession can be merged together before submission to the underlying transport. When this option is set to True, blocks are submitted to the transport without merging, i.e., exactly as they are sent by the Transmit or Script panes. |
False |
| RX buffer full notifications | Toggle warnings in log about the incoming data (RX) buffer getting full. | False |
Note
An example of an adapter dropdown on a typical Windows laptop is shown below:
