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opsdisk / the_cyber_plumbers_handbook

Free copy of The Cyber Plumber's Handbook - The definitive guide to Secure Shell (SSH) tunneling, port redirection, and bending traffic like a boss.
https://opsdisk.gumroad.com/l/cphlab
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Using shell prompts to help readabilty #5

Open zenfish opened 2 years ago

zenfish commented 2 years ago

Some commands are not immediately obvious as to what host you are asking people to type things on. Esp. for simple things this isn't much of an issue, but when you're shuffling commands between several hosts the text can be ambiguous... for instance (p42, netcat chat):

"For this demonstration, we are also going to initiate a vanilla SSH connection to TARGET1, in order to get a shell on the box."

ssh -p 22 nemo@192 .168.1.230

Initiate a SSH connection from where? (To be fair you do usually say it in the text, but not always, and if this is for people learning... why not be more clear?)

Having a prompt with a hostname would make it clear that you're talking about doing this from KALI... e.g. (prompt whatever, but have that hostname in) -

root@kali: ~ ssh -p 22 nemo@192 .168.1.230

I'll note that the screenshots of your kali box always has the prompt with the hostname clearly indicated (having a different color for the prompt also helps clarify what to type.)

One downside is it makes it ever-so-slightly harder to cut-n-paste, but presumably no one is going to use the same hostname/IPs as you use anyway, so... again, IMHO.

opsdisk commented 2 years ago

Hi @zenfish - Appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback. The recent increased popularity has come with more eyes finding areas of improvement for the book. I'll keep this issue open as a reference for potential future updates.

Random note - Your past research with IPMI was great! I remember reading your original work 7-8 years ago.