dsh-netassist

Part of the dsh-toolkit family: dsh-mcp-bridge · dsh-win-toolkit · dsh-netassist · dsh-driftwatch

Network & proxy assistant for DeepSeek Harness (dsh).

Born from real-world China-network pain: GitHub flaky, proxies everywhere, hosts conflicts, TUN vs system proxy confusion. This plugin gives your agent one-shot answers to "is GitHub reachable?", "what proxy is my system using?", "is my proxy port alive?", plus a full diagnosis chain — all read-only, all injection-safe.

中文文档见 README.zh.md。

Platform

Windows. Proxy detection reads the Windows registry and the checks shell out to powershell.exe. On other platforms the tools start but their checks cannot run, and they say so (spawn powershell.exe ENOENT) instead of reporting a clean result.

Timing

Every check spawns a powershell.exe, and a cold one costs roughly 20 seconds to start. So on a freshly booted Windows machine:

• the individual tools answer within about half a minute
• net_doctor can exceed a minute, because it runs four checks in parallel plus a port probe

Most MCP clients default to a 60-second request timeout, so net_doctor may time out on a cold machine even though it is working. If that happens, call the individual checks (net_github_status, net_proxy_status, net_hosts_check) instead, or raise your client's request timeout. Once PowerShell has been used a few times the cost drops sharply.

Tools

Tool	What it answers
net_github_status	Is GitHub reachable right now? (DNS + TCP 443)
net_proxy_status	System proxy config: registry ProxyEnable/ProxyServer/ProxyOverride + proxy env vars
net_proxy_probe	Which common local proxy ports are alive? (default 10808/10809/7890/7897/8888/1080)
net_diag	Full chain for any host: DNS → TCP → HTTPS status code
net_hosts_check	GitHub entries pinned in the hosts file (proxy conflict scan)

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-netassist
dsh web   # restart

Then ask your agent:

• "check if github.com is reachable" → net_github_status
• "what proxy is my system using?" → net_proxy_status
• "is my proxy running?" → net_proxy_probe
• "why can't I reach api.example.com:8443?" → net_diag host=api.example.com port=8443
• "any github entries in my hosts?" → net_hosts_check

How it works

Every tool runs a short read-only PowerShell snippet through powershell.exe -NoProfile -NonInteractive. All user input crosses the script boundary as Base64 — injection-proof by construction. No writes, no admin rights, no dependencies.

• Config: psTimeoutMs (default 25000) — per-call PowerShell timeout, settable in your profile's cordis.patch.yml under the netassist entry.
• Windows-only: tools fail loudly on non-Windows platforms.

Real-world example (this machine)

net_github_status → DNS: 20.205.243.166, TCP 443: OPEN
net_proxy_status  → ProxyEnable: 1, ProxyServer: 127.0.0.1:10808
net_proxy_probe   → 10808 OPEN, 10809/7890/7897/8888/1080 CLOSED
net_hosts_check   → no github entries in hosts (clean)

Troubleshooting

• "PowerShell failed": usually execution-policy or anti-virus interference. The plugin uses -NoProfile -NonInteractive; check Get-ExecutionPolicy — it does not require RemoteSigned.
• Port probes use a 5s connect timeout each, so a full probe takes ~5-10s worst case.

Links

• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dsh-netassist
• GitHub: https://github.com/Edge-Echo/dsh-netassist
• License: MIT