nc -l – Starting up a fake service

Hi everyone!

Recently i have faced a situation that made me find out a very nice and useful command that helped me a lot, and i hope it comes to help you guys as well, and it’s named:

nc

Situation: We have a replicated environment from one datacenter to another (Using Golden Gate), where the ETL happens. So basically is:

Datacenter 1 (root data)

Replicates to datacenter 2 (transforming the data)

that replicates to datacenter 3 (production itself)

In Datacenter level 2, we have a dataguard configured. So then came the question:

• What if we need to do the switchover to the standby environments?
• Will we gonna have everything we need properly set up for the replication?
• How are we going to test the ports if nothing is up in there? Aren’t we gonna get “connection refused”?

Calm down! There is a very nice workaround for this.

All you need to do is install the nc command as root (if it is not installed already):

yum install nc

Then execute it as follows, on the server you wanna test:

nc -l

example:

I wanna make sure that on the standby server the port 7809 (Golden Gate MANAGER port) is open. On the standby server you run:

nc -l 7809

Then, from a remote server, you are going to be able to connect through a simple telnet command:

telnet server.domain port

example:

telnet standby.company.com 7809

ON PRACTICE:

• Try the telnet from the remote server to the standby:

remoteserver {/home/oracle}: telnet standby.server 7809

Trying 192.168.0.10…

telnet: connect to address 192.168.0.10: Connection refused

• Then we start the fake service on the standby server!

standby.server {/home/oracle}: nc -l 7809

• And try the telnet again:

remoteserver {/home/oracle}: telnet standby.server 7809

Trying 192.168.0.10…

Connected to standby.server.

Escape character is ‘^]’.

Cheers!

Rafael.