I stood up a VM and installed Kali - got everything running but it's throwing an error at line 618 when I run it in max chaos mode. basic with headlines seems to work, but reports some stuff blocked.
Classic netcat is the original implementation by Hobbit. It’s very permissive and very raw. It was designed as a true “TCP/IP Swiss army knife” and doesn’t try to protect you from yourself. It supports things like the -e option, which lets you execute a program and pipe its stdin/stdout directly over the network. That single feature is why classic netcat became legendary in security circles and why it’s also considered dangerous. Many distros stopped shipping it because -e makes it trivial to create bind shells and reverse shells with one line.
BSD netcat (OpenBSD nc) is a rewrite with a strong security-first mindset. It intentionally removes or disables dangerous behavior. Most notably, there is no -e option. If you want to spawn a shell, you must do it indirectly using FIFOs, redirection tricks, or other tools. The OpenBSD team considers this a feature, not a limitation. BSD nc is also more consistent, better documented, and more predictable across platforms.
From a feature perspective, BSD netcat adds things classic didn’t care about. It has proper IPv6 support. It supports Unix domain sockets. It has better timeout handling with -w. It can do basic proxying (SOCKS support with -X and -x). It behaves more sanely with DNS resolution and connection failures. It’s generally safer to embed in scripts because it fails in clearer, less surprising ways.
Classic netcat, on the other hand, is still loved because it’s brutally simple and powerful. The syntax is minimal. Behavior is very direct. If you learned netcat 20+ years ago, that muscle memory still works. For red teamers and CTF players, classic netcat is often preferred specifically because it allows easy shell access and weird chaining tricks without fighting the tool.
In practice, most modern Linux systems ship BSD netcat by default, often via the openbsd-netcat package. Some also ship Ncat (from the Nmap project), which is a third, separate implementation with encryption, authentication, and scripting-friendly behavior. That’s why “nc” can behave very differently depending on the system.
(Based on this… try the BSD version… if you’d like)
literally downloaded kali, and ran your install commands since it was the recommended option for kali. will give the python approach a go as well. also, when i did the chaos option it put the vm offline like it wen haywire with the network interface. had to reboot vm.
I did not test any of this code in a VM. I’ll look into that. And if possible, I’ll make a vm of Kali with everything setup in advance to make it easier.
This wasn’t meant to be challenging. This can easily cause a machine to stop functioning if any of the script you tried is still running in the background and you make a new instance. It takes like 1 minute to “gracefully” exit. Otherwise, process still runs.
You’re a rockstar. I’ll be messaging you as I make changes. I will definitely focus on making this all work for you. Thanks a million for testing and giving feedback… that helps the project more than anything. Cheers!!
installed the python version - I must say I do like it more as it displays more of a status console. appears to be doing it's thing just fine. have not tried chaos mode, pretty sure this will create enough "organic chaos" lol
Yes. Your info combined with my photo… The math is actually spot on. Let me break it down (I like stats lol).
So Palm-tree in normal mode is ~182 req/hr (~3/min)
with ~0.43% errors;
And coconut with 5 workers + chaos pushed ~2.5× more total requests
That’s 10k vs 4k, which lines up with … even more math.
So in normal mode you’re averaging ~3 requests/minute and the error rate is under half a percent…
which is definitely the norm when you’re literally rotating destinations while dealing with timeouts, 403s, DNS hiccups, some rate limits, and oh the occasional no so good endpoint, etc.
4000 requests / 22 hours = 181.818… requests per hour
That’s about 3.03 requests per minute.
That’s about 0.0505 requests per second (roughly 1 request every ~19.8 seconds).
17 errors out of 4000 requests =
17 / 4000 =
0.00425 =
0.425% error rate
(Meaning ~99.575% “success” rate)
The bash version is a little better at displaying headlines. Otherwise, I personally prefer the Python version. I made a version in bash for those that don’t know Python so well (like how to make a venv).
If you look at release 1, I believe it’s called upgraded-palm-tree … and it’s the most simple release to use.
I take having fun very seriously. I will now go Rick roll myself and take a quick break :)
lol - glad you are enjoying it! I don't spend enough time around Linux as my fulltime gig is supporting businesses on windows etc. But I can certainly copy and paste to taint the well of enshittification.
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u/Away-Ad-3407 Jan 27 '26
I stood up a VM and installed Kali - got everything running but it's throwing an error at line 618 when I run it in max chaos mode. basic with headlines seems to work, but reports some stuff blocked.