Can anyone help me on this?  I'm still stuck...

While I'm still trying to understand the 'why' behind it (proving I'm not yet a Ruby guru... and any Ruby gurus out there can reply, please, to help me, too, while I continue to read up and see if I can find the understanding) it evidently has something to do with data 'freezing' and the difference between sock.put and sock.puts...  (note:  one ends in an s, the other does not)  I was looking through some of the existing MSF scanners, and noted in many examples I'd found, that they were doing a sock.put, rather than a sock.puts.  Simply changing that one piece will allow your script to run correctly, and receive the 'banner' that the text file is supposed to simulate.

HTH.

Tim

Hey thanks a lot hayabusa!  I will give that a shot.

I was investigating the sock.puts, but didn't see sock.put.  I did come across this http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/62012 which kinda sounds similar but I didn't understand how that could have any bearing on the error message I was receiving.

Come to think about it, I should have just looked at other scanners... 

I believe the core part of the problem is that puts append a new line and somewhere down the line it may be doing an append of "\n" somewhere along the line.  Metasploit seems to have encountered this in the past as about everything I've seen uses put for dealing with sockets.  Switching it from sock.puts to sock.put fixes the problem for me. 

As I read further, last night, the issue seemed to have sprung from a Rex update, in the past.  (Rex is 'included' in some of the msf modules, which are included in the 'simple_tcp.rb scanner' exercise.)  Evidently, at some point, puts would've worked, and perhaps, in older ruby versions and older msf (quite possibly the previous versions that existed when the tutorial was originally written,) puts might've worked ok.  But now, as we've noted, it seems the proper / best / working option is to use put, instead.

Cheers, gents!

Technically both of those are legit.  Metasploit will only really do tab completion for fully qualified contexts but inside Metasploit it mostly addresses the modules outside of the context of aux/exploit/payload. 

So if you know what you are going after:

is functionally equivalent to:

Even payloads are addressable in a similar way (and through the generate command you can now do almost everything you can through msfencode/msfpayload now that my patch got in)

so you could:
or
[quote[use windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp[/quote]

set your LHOST

then :

in order to create your reverse_tcp windows exploit using any encoder that works works and encoding the payload 5 times.

set your LHOST

then :

in order to create your reverse_tcp windows exploit using any encoder that works works and encoding the payload 5 times.

[/quote]

Nice, I hadn't realized this could be done for the payloads, too.  Thanks!