11 ms·

I do not see an advantage over socat, which can listen on _TCP_-sockets (among 20 other „socket“ inputs) and forward them into unix-sockets. Please tell me? :-/

• rhn_mk1 6y ago
  You don't have to firewall the superfluous open IP socket any more.
• toast0 6y ago
  From the documentation, it seems this utility uses LD_PRELOAD to change IP socket calls into Unix socket calls; which seems useful if you want to do namespaced and access controlled process to process communication with programs that don't already know how to use unix sockets. socat as a TCP to unix socket proxy is doing a different job.
• aszlig 6y ago
  As others have mentioned, socat acts more like a router between different socket types/protocols but it doesn't change the behaviour of the program in question. So for example if you have a service listening to TCP port 1234, you could do something like this: socat UNIX-LISTEN:foo.sock TCP:localhost:1234 Now the service will still listen to port 1234 and you now have another socket that redirects to the other. This not only comes with a bit of overhead, but port 1234 is still reachable. While using packet filtering on that port might lower the attack surface a bit, this won't prevent other (possibly compromised) services/users on the system to access port 1234. Sure you could also filter based on uid, but IMHO it's better if that port isn't accessible in the first place.