nicepipe

Nicepipe is netcat for p2p connections.

It allows you to setup a network connection between two peers even if they are behind a NAT and uses your SSH keypairs to secure the connection.

nicepipe solves two problems two problems that usually occur when you want to connect two computers somewhere on the planet:

1. No DNS required

nicepipe uses exchange_provider scripts to exchange IPs of the hosts

2. No NAT configuration required:

nicepipe uses STUN/ICE to circumvent your NAT and so you don't have to modify your firewall configuration.

Installation

nicepipe requires glib, libnice, socat and your SSH RSA key pairs ($HOME/.ssh/id_rsa). To compile just run make.

Usage

nicepipe uses your SSH key pairs ($HOME/.ssh/id_rsa) to setup a secure connection between the two peers. Currently a file hosting service like Dropbox or Ubuntu One setup (MUST be the same account OR MUST be a shared folder of two accounts (both need write permission)) on each peers.

1. Make sure you have generated an SSH key pairs (otherwise use ssh-keygen).

2. Change into your file hosting service's directory on both machines (called alice and bob), e.g.

# This is Alice's machine                                        |  # This is Bob's machine
alice$ cd ~/Dropbox                                              |  bob$ cd ~/Dropbox

3a. Run nicepipe in pipe-mode on both machines:

alice ~/Dropbox$ echo Hello Bob! | ./nicepipe pipe -c 1 -H bob   |  bob ~/Dropbox$ echo Hello Alice! |  ./nicepipe pipe -c 0 -H alice
Hello Alice!                                                     |  Hello Bob!

3b. Run nicepipe in vpn-mode on both machines:

alice ~/Dropbox$ sudo ./nicepipe vpn -c 1 -H bob                 |  bob ~/Dropbox$ sudo ./nicepipe vpn -c 0 -H alice
Creating new network interface with IP# 10.0.1.2/24              |  Creating new network interface with IP# 10.0.1.1/24

Then you can connect from one machine to the other:

alice $ echo Hello Bob! | nc -l 10.0.1.2 10000                   |  bob $ echo Hello Alice! | nc 10.0.1.2 10000
Hello Alice!                                                     |  Hello Bob!

Troubleshooting

Address already in use

Either the address is really still in use (look at netstat -nl) or your previous session did not end gracefully. In the latter case, wait some seconds and try again

Connection is not established

Remove $HOME/Dropbox/.nice* and try again or add the argument -s stunserver.org.

You have a better idea for exchanging IP addresses?

Just implement another exchange provider. They take two arguments:

First Argument

0 if it's the caller (client) and 1 if it's the callee (server).

Second Argument

If the second argument is publish then the stdin MUST be written where the other peer finds it. If the second argument is lookup then the data published by the other peer MUST be written to stdout. If the second argument is unpublish then the data previously published SHOULD be unpublished (optional).

e.g.

alice$ ./exchange_providers/dummy 1 publish             # writes stdin to a file where bob can find it

License

GPL

Terms MAY, MUST, SHOULD etc. according to RFC 2119.