introduction to TELNET

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TELNET

TELNET (TELecommunication NETwork) is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area network (LAN) connections. It was developed in 1969 beginning with RFC 15 and standardized as IETF STD 8, one of the first Internet standards.

The term telnet also refers to software which implements the client part of the protocol. TELNET clients have been available on most Unix systems for many years and are available for virtually all platforms. Most network equipment and OSs with a TCP/IP stack support some kind of TELNET service server for their remote configuration (including ones based on Windows NT). Recently, Secure Shell has begun to dominate remote access for Unix-based machines.

"To telnet" is also used as a verb meaning to establish or use a TELNET or other interactive TCP connection, as in, "To change your password, telnet to the server and run the passwd command".

Most often, a user will be telneting to a Unix-like server system or a simple network device such as a switch. For example, a user might "telnet in from home to check his mail at school". In doing so, he would be using a telnet client to connect from his computer to one of his servers. Once the connection is established, he would then log in with his account information and execute operating system commands remotely on that computer, such as ls or cd.

On many systems, the client may also be used to make interactive raw-TCP sessions, even when that option is not available, telnet sessions are equivalent to raw TCP as long as byte 255 never appears in the data.

 Protocol details

TELNET is a client-server protocol, based on a reliable connection-oriented transport. Typically this is TCP port 23, although TELNET predates TCP/IP and was originally run on NCP.

The protocol has many extensions, some of which have been adopted as Internet standards. IETF standards STD 27 through STD 32 define various extensions, most of which are extremely common. Other extensions are on the IETF standards track as proposed standards.