On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 05:33:46PM -0800, Ben Barrett wrote: > On more occasions, I [wish to] use a hammer, than telnet! How could I > ever reach my full potential without telnet? Maybe by hand-crafting > packets... maybe by learning more about microsoft's software... Maybe I > should just put the keyboard down, and start exploring some REAL > potential. Let's note that I am far from my full potential. Still I feel telnet is crucial. Maybe if you used telnet to see what is going on, you wouldn't want the hammer.
> Of course I use telnet. I don't often spend time using it for anything > REALLY useful. It comes in most handy as a understanding tool, IMO, and > I'd like to hear about useful "work" (ie, think a force acting through > some distance) you do with it. I advise almost everyone I talk to about > telnet, NOT to use it. Why are we so damn worried about privacy when > most hosting services use ftp and telnet?? Potential terrorists can > easily sniff networks to abuse many many hosting accounts, to cause DDoS > attacks upon our very critical networked systems. Telnet is useful as a > learning tool, and as a "hacking tool". If your network administration > involves debugging, why not use more advanced tools? More advanced tools or higher level (read: less control) tools? The part about privacy and security is confusing the telnet protocol versus the telnet command. Other than the examples I've already given for using it for troubleshooting, I wrote a perl script that uses telnet to connect to a variety of webservers and issue an http command. The script then checks for a 200 OK response. I use this to determine a few things. 1) My webserver is up. 2) my internet line is up. 3) tcp is working as expected. Of course Jacob is right, a similar tool like netcat (nc) works just as well or better. Thanks for the reminder, I'll have to explore and use netcat and netsed more. I think netcat IS the "advanced tool" you're refering to Ben! There are some appliances such as switches, routers, print servers that have a telnet only management server. You are right to tell people to avoid using telnet to remotely connect to a server to do work when ssh is available. An admin's job usually encompases more than just sshing to a remote server. It includes regular troubleshooting of all kinds of network services. Telnet or netcat is the "TCP/IP swiss army knife" attached to the admin's belt. As the nc(1) page says. Anyway I think this thread has degraded from useless information to worse... Sorry for pushing your buttons! ;) Cory _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
