The wire into the cloud is now *smoking*, of course, possibly because A1 didn't mention mirror sites for netcat: zippy.telcom.arizona.edu:/pub/mirrors/avian.org/hacks/nc100.tgz ftp.sterling.com:/mirrors/avian.org/src/hacks/nc100.tgz coast.cs.purdue.edu:/pub/tools/unix/netcat/nc100.tgz and possibly gw.rge.com:/pub/security/coast/tools/unix/netcat/nc100.tgz At least I *think* that's the current picture, not having actually rechecked them lately. YMMV but you'll definitely get your copy faster if you hit one of these. A new version of netcat is in the works; mostly unchanged from 1.00 except for some tiny bugfixes. It'll include a better bunch of companion programs. _H*