website/content/blog/socatforward.md

---
title: "Forward Packets with Socat"
date: 2021-06-18T19:38:43-04:00
draft: false
tags: ["Networking"]
---

I've written about relaying TCP traffic using [SSH port forwarding](https://brandonrozek.com/blog/sshlocalportforwarding/). Though sometimes you don't require the authenticity and encryption of SSH or want to use another protocol such as UDP. That's where `socat` comes in.

The following will listen to TCP traffic on port 8001 and redirect it to TCP localhost:8000

```bash
socat tcp-listen:8001,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:8000
```

This will listen UDP on port 4009 and forward it to UDP localhost:4010

```bash
socat udp-listen:4009,reuseaddr,fork udp:localhost:4010
```