Telnet useless?

ok when you telnet into a windows system you get a banner, what do you do from there? as far as i can tell you cant get a command line you cant do anything....is telnet useless against a windows system?

Perhaps the service is not working properly which could be caused by a variety of things is it your machine your trying to telnet to?

no it's a wargames server that a friend of mine set up for us. I port scanned it smtp was open so was net-bios 139 and telnet 23 so i telneted into all of them and all i got was a banner and a bad request message.

Maybe it's not actually a telnet server, but something else set to run on port 23 - that or it wasn't configured correctly.
It would help to know what the banner says

Telnet is fun to use and can be useful to gain some info but it is not really a good tool for war games nowadays.

what kind of "windows system"? if ur trying 9x dont bother, if its NT/2k their might be a problem.

But the computer you connect to must have teh service running, like an FTP server (21)or a Webserver(80) you cant connect to it if it dosnt exist, try a non-aggreeive portscan to see if 23 is open

here`s a telnet tut from alastavista if ithelps ive not read it
http://www.astalavista.com/library/basics/networking/ then the file TELNET-EXPLAINED.zip


preep

It should be working, ask the guy about it. Sounds weird to me.

As far as I know, Telnet communication is almost useless nowadays... all firewalls, routers, and even ISP's cast a suspicious eye on them.
Are you sure that your Telnet request isn't being blocked at your own ISP even BEFORE it gets to your intended target?
Just a thought...

Ouroboros

i never heard of a ISP bloking telnet...how would they even do that? anyway telnet is very usefull u people are thinking of "telnet" as just port 23. telnet it a program... and u use it to connect to difenret ports but most comonly 23. services such as telnet, whois, finger and many others is usefull and does not autmaticly seem something supciuse is going on. True it was used alot more yrs ago but I'm just not sure u all know about the good telnet brings, lol.

Telnets great but if you’re looking for security there are better options. One good thing is that it works well and the client is installed on almost every single computer.

yeah thats true cwk9, but there is ssh if ya loooking for security but that may not be what ur talking about security wise.

Mucolaca> By blocking telnet at the ISP, no one is saying you can't telnet out. A lot of places have the ISP block any incomming request to port 23. If you install an SSH server, there is NO need to have 23 open. And if you are running a box with 23 open, you are just asking for trouble.

There are still a lot of routers and RAS servers and the like the "require" telnet if you want to get in to them remotely (ie. to admin them). Yeah... pretty much means that you get to setup a "secure" segment/vlan that only runs that sort of stuff if you want to try to make it unsnoopable (or put an ssh server in front of it with a small private net, etc).

But telnet has other uses other than just "login" -- I'll refrain for further "useful information" in this forum, however.