Http scripting

 curl is an open source http scripting tool that can be used to make/ gets the data.  it sends data and it retrieves the information.

curl --trace-ascii d.txt --trace-time http://thetechiehouse.blogspot.com/

curl -o blog.html http://thetechiehouse.blogspot.com/

http authentication curl --user name:password http://www.google.com
post curl --data "birthyear=1905&press=%20OK%20" http://www.example.com/when.cgi

 curl --basic --user-agent “<user_agent>"  —<user_name>:<pwd>  "<url>"

curl -i 

 -H "Accept: application/json"

 -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded"

  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36"

   -X POST "http://www.mysite.com/form" -d"param1=val1"

Getting data from secured service:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <service_auth_token>" 'secured_service_Url'

Getting IP configuration

ipconfig//win

ifconfig// mac

Querying DNS to get IP address mapping

nslookup google.com

network statistics

netstat -n

TCP packet dump

tcpdump -l -x

tcpdump allows us to save the packets that are captured, so that we can use it for future analysis. The saved file can be viewed by the same tcpdump command.

nslookup google.com

dig google.com

curl google.com

curl -L -V google.com

curl-L google.com

curl for sftp:

curl  -k ---user user:pwd sftp://abc.com/path

ping vs curl

Ping only checks if the remote host is answering ICMP packets, which (usually) means it's up and running;
- This doesn't give you any information about which services the host is actually offering.

An HTTP GET request checks that there is a web server running on the host, that it answers to a given IP/port/hostname combo
 that you asked it for a valid URL and that the web site is able to answer your request.


If IIS (or Apache) is stopped on the host, it will very well answer a Ping request, but a HTTP GET will fail.