Netcat vs Socat – Key Differences Explained

Using netcat or socat as proxy will only work for a single website, if at all. This is because your browser can't instruct netcat/socat to connect to a specific target IP. socat's proxy connection functionality is also limited to connecting to a single IP through an existing HTTP proxy.

For an ad-hoc HTTP proxy, use ssh. This will open a socks 5 compatible server on port 8080:

ssh -NCD8080 user@your.proxy.server

• -N removes shell
• -C adds compression
• -D is for socks proxy.

Any browser supporting socks proxy can now connect to localhost port 8080.

If you connect with telnet and start by giving the command term len 0, it seems to not use pagination.

At a guess, the reason it doesn't do any pagination when using netcat is that it's probably not doing the expected TELNET protocol negotiations for basic terminal characteristics.

Edit: Seems the main problem is that it just plain takes too long to display the full routing table. After leaving a telnet session, with term len 0 and sh ip bgp running, I ended up with:

Vty connection is timed out.
Connection closed by foreign host.

It MAY be that having periodic data sent to the route server (maybe a space character every 45 seconds) may be enough to not trigger the VTY time-out, but I'd need to check the source code to be sure.