One of the things that I find lacking in netcat is a timestamp feature. You can log the requests but you can not easy log the exact timestamps. Instead of writing a wrapper around netcat I wrote a small python script that can act as a simple TCP or UDP network server.
A lot of the code is inspired on code at http://ilab.cs.byu.edu/python/select/echoserver.html and http://www.binarytides.com/udp-socket-programming-in-winsock/
All of the code can be found on Github together … Read more.