Remote Targets

heretek connects to remote GDB sessions without requiring gdbserver. Many embedded and vendor-shipped environments have broken or missing gdbserver binaries, but heretek works around this using only gdb, nc, cat, and mkfifo.

Setting Up the Remote Side

On the remote target, set up a pipe and start GDB listening over netcat:

$ mkfifo gdb_pipe
$ cat gdb_pipe | gdb --interpreter=mi | nc -l -p 12345 > gdb_pipe

This creates a bidirectional pipe between GDB’s MI interface and a network socket on port 12345.

Connecting from heretek

On your local machine, connect to the remote session:

$ heretek --remote <host>:<port>

For example:

$ heretek --remote 192.168.1.100:12345

heretek will connect to the remote GDB session and display the TUI dashboard as if it were a local session.