positron-solutions / unixsocks

stdio <-> socks4a unix socket socat clone

Unixsocks

Want a stdio capable client to connect to a tor service but socat doesn't accept unix addresses and you've configured your tor client to serve local clients over a unix socket? This is your tool!

Usage

If your tor service is exposing a unix socket to your user at /run/tor/behind-nat/users.sock and has the tor address a2bg8me3awc9x8zb.onion which accepts connections on 700 and forwards those to a remote ssh server started on demand, your ssh config in ~/.ssh/config will contain entries like this:

Host behind-nat-ssh-server
    Hostname a2bg8me3awc9x8zb.onion
    ProxyCommand unixsocks --port 700 --socket-path /run/tor/behind-nat/users.sock --remote-host a2bg8me3awc9x8zb.onion
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/behind-nat-ssh-server-git
    User git

Host behind-nat-ssh-server
    Hostname a2bg8me3awc9x8zb.onion
    ProxyCommand unixsocks --port 700 --socket-path /run/tor/behind-nat/users.sock --remote-host a2bg8me3awc9x8zb.onion
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/behind-nat-ssh-server-backdoor
    User backdoor-user

Building & Installing

There are four ways to obtain a binary:

1. You can build using cargo if you have a Rust toolchain installed by cargo build --release and just point your ProxyCommand to unixsocks/target/bin/unixsocks

2. To use an ephemeral environment with unixsocks available, you can run the defaultApp directly off of the flake with nix run github:positron-solutions/unixsocks --command "unisocks" "arg" "arg" "arg"

3. Also using nix flakes, you can run nix build and point ProxyCommand to unixsocks/result-bin/bin/unixsocks

4. On legacy nix, use plain nix-build on the above.

5. If you use home manager, you can include this repo in your inputs as either a flake input path or as a path to a locally checked out copy.

{ pkgs, ... }:
  let
    unixsocks = (import ./unixsocks/); # this is defaultPackage from the flake
  in {
    home.packages = [
      unixsocks
    ];
  } 

Build & activate this updated profile with home-manager switch and now unixsocks will be available on your path.

Development

This repository provides a shell that can be used with nix develop or by direnv activate. See cargo2nix for more information on debugging crate builds.

The environment includes all dependencies and state configuration to successfully build this repository with just cargo build. There are some differences between the actual sanboxed build and the build in the development shell, but they are minimized.