telnetd/README.md

telnetd for GNO

This is a port of the telnet server (telnetd) for GNO, based on FreeBSD sources. It allows you to log in to a GNO system remotely using telnet. To use it, you need GNO 2.0.6 and MariGNOtti 0.4 or later. It may also work with other TCP/IP stacks for GNO, but that is untested. Note that it will not work with Sweet16, because Sweet16's TCP/IP configuration does not support servers running on the emulated IIgs.

The binary download also includes inetd (compiled from GNO 2.0.6 sources), since telnetd is designed to be run from inetd.

The source repository also includes code for the telnet client, but it does not currently work and is not included in the download.

Installation

1. Copy the telnetd and inetd binaries to your /usr/local/bin directory. (If you use a different location, you will have to adjust the configuration files appropriately.)

2. Copy the etc/inetd.conf file to your /etc directory. (If you have an existing /etc/inetd.conf file, you should add the new entry to the end of it instead.)

Running telnetd

Once you have completed the above steps, you can enable the telnet server (in addition to any other servers managed by inetd) by starting MariGNOtti and then simply running inetd as root. It will accept any number of telnet connections (up to the limit of system resources) and continue running until you stop inetd or shut down GNO.

It is also possible to run telnetd -debug (as root) to accept a telnet connection without using inetd. In this mode, telnetd will accept a single telnet connection and quit once that connection finishes. For more information on running telnetd, see the included telnetd.8 man page (which does not currently display correctly on GNO). Be aware that some features, including authentication, encryption, line mode, and IPv6 support, are not available on GNO.

Starting the server automatically

If you want your GNO system to accept telnet connections as soon as it starts up (without logging in on the local console and running inetd), you can make MariGNOtti and inetd start up automatically. To do this, you can add lines like the following to the /etc/inittab file (these are similar to commented-out lines for GS/TSP in the stock GNO 2.0.6 version of the file, which you can modify):

ip:2348:once::/usr/local/bin/marignotti
id:234:once::/usr/local/bin/inetd

If you add these lines, you will also need to set the default run level to one that will start up inetd, e.g. run level 3. If you are using the stock GNO 2.0.6 configuration, you can just change the 8 to a 3 in the following line :

db:b:runl::8

Note the the meaning of the run levels is just a convention and you can use different ones if you want; see the init(8) man page for details.

Connecting to GNO over telnet

Once you have your system set up as described above, you should be able to telnet to its IP address and connect to it. In some cases, I have seen the first attempted connection be quite slow and occasionally fail; if that happens, try again.

If you are connecting to GNO from a modern terminal emulator, you will also want to set it up appropriately to use that terminal type. The telnet client will normally indicate the terminal type when connecting, and telnetd will set the TERM environment variable accordingly. Make sure your shell login/startup scripts are not resetting it to something inappropriate. (In particular, the default gshrc script sets TERM to gnocon; you should remove that line.)

You will also want to add a termcap entry for your terminal in /etc/termcap. The included etc/xterm.termcap file provides an entry that should be suitable for several modern terminal emulators, including xterm and OS X's Terminal.app. On many modern *nix systems, you can run infocmp -C to get an entry for your terminal. Note that termcap entries on GNO are strictly limited to 1023 characters.