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OK.Here's the deal.I'm a complete n00b to telnet/unix/anything to do with the whole thing.I'd like some help as far as the do's & don't,anything I should know security-wise involving it,and recommended reading.Try to keep it simple,because the extent of my knowledge with this is a few of the basic commands and that's about it.Right now,it's nothing more than a strange,confusing,foreign world to me,but it seems like it could be interesting and useful.
telnet is a nice thing
try "telnet introduction" in google an it gives you tons of information
A telnet server comes with most versions of linux and can be enabled/disabled/configured through xinetd. If you need to download a telnet server my suggestion is go to rpmfind.net.
Telnet sends everything over the network in clear text, including passwords. Someone with a sniffer on the network might be able to read your username and password (as its in plain text and not encrypted). For security reasons you might want to look into using SSH.
Telnet is an old but very good program that you can find in any Windows, linux or other distro and which is generally used to comunicate with some services/daemons in text mode.
A tutorial about it was posted at http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=233245
As Meister said, all the answers about it will be on Google.
Basically it is an emulator to turn your computer into a "dumb terminal" from back in the days when companies used terminals to do work but didnt really have any processing power, but the others are right, theres no security with it, and Putty is a better alternative and lets you use ssh to connect to a remote server if you need to get something done that has important info you dont want others reading, just search for putty its pretty easy too find. and if you look for telnet how to texts or texts on telnet and putty yo should be fine.
....And after finding out info about this, you might want to look into a really neat Telnet/SSH client called "Putty". It has a really nice interface, it works better than the built in one on Windows, and has alot better features than most telnet/ssh clients. I'd definitely check it out.
By the way the tut. referenced by KissCool is written by me. I hope that you may find it useful.
Good advice all around. The best advice for telnet is not to use it, because it was designed at a time when the Internet was a much more trusting place than it is now. 15 or 20 years ago, nobody worried much about password sniffing, and telnet was designed accordingly. Telnet is a relic of an age long gone.... a dinosaur among Internet protocols. With the SSH protocol having reached the level of acceptance and maturity it has, there is really no compelling reason to use telnet anymore unless you absolutely need to access a server that doesn't accept anything else.
The same also goes for FTP, although that protocol is hanging on much better than telnet due to the prevalence of anonymous FTP sites on the Internet. But I guess it's fine for that purpose, because it would be pretty pointless to sniff an anonymous login. :D I would never use it for a real user login, though.... well, not on the open Internet anyway.
Thanx everybody for the help.I'm sort of seeing problemchild's point,but I still think I'm gonna mess around with it a little bit.I'll keep it anonymous though.If it's on my computer I have to mess with it.That's just the way I operate.I checked out tour tut hollow_man,and it did help(thanx).I will also try out putty.
Remeber telnet is more then a clent/server, but also an important protocol, one step above raw tcp/ip as it provides control characters etc. lots of services, IRC for example, actually use telnet protocol. If you are really, really interested you can read the RFC here: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc318.html
A telnet client is a nice way to mess around with lots of services on remote hosts, grabbing banners, port surfing etc.
I think it's good to learn about it even though it's so old. ;) It's good to know where it all started, and there are underlying concepts, I think, that can be learned and applied even to security and remote administration now. I have the same problem with playing with everything to see how it works gg. It's fun! :D They're right, however, ssh is much better.
i'd have to say i agree with everyone else here, its always a handy thing to know about, just to know the basics, how to get a file, put a file on a remote server, it can be extremely useful when you have a remote unix system and want to transfer files to an IBM compat. machine
the way we have it set up at uni is so we can (with X-win) have a virtual desktop on our novell network from our unix network, basically on unix its like X-win without the GUI parts, so it can be very handy if you have a slow net connection or havn't got an FTP program at hand :-)
"OK.Here's the deal.I'm a complete n00b to telnet/unix/anything to do with the whole thing.I'd like some help as far as the do's & don't,anything I
should know security-wise involving it,"
Yep telnet is insecure it has security risks: man in the middle attacks,password theft (because your password is in clear text this information can be captured by intruders) session hijacking by intruder do yourself a favor and avoid Telnet especially if your going to login to systems remotely. Look up Open SSH on google and read some papers on how
to install it and secure it correctly.
I'd suggest as a start to visit www.mandrakesecure.com and read the paper 'getting the most out of openssh'
Good Luck!