[X-Apps] Telnet

[Dan Frakes]

Donna wrote:
> Now why couldn't the built in Mac Help or the Apple site put that
> where you could find it, with a word search on "Telnet"?!?

The reason it's not listed in Mac OS Help is because it's not a function of
the Mac OS. Telnet is a Unix command-line protocol, so it's a function of
your Unix shell (in Terminal) :)  I can understand the view that it would be
helpful to include this in Mac Help, but keep in mind that there are
literally thousands of Unix commands built into OS X, so including them in
Mac Help would a) bloat Mac Help to an enormous degree; and b) confuse most
users -- who don't use and are often intimidated by Terminal -- with search
results that contain more Terminal commands than Mac OS items.

Plus, every Terminal command has its own help file (called a man page, for
"manual page"), and your shell (the program that runs when you open
Terminal) actually has a built-in search function. To search for a
particular Terminal/Unix command, type

apropos term

where term is what you're looking for (e.g. "apropos telnet"). This will
provide you with a list of programs/commands that match your search. To see
the manual for a particular command, type

man command

where command is the name of the command. (Note that the apropos command
will often return results with numbers such as "telnet(1)"; to use a
command, or get its man page, drop the number and parentheses. For example,
"man telnet" will give you the manual page for the telnet command.)


Doug McNutt <douglist at macnauchtan.com> wrote:
> As far as I know it is impossible to telnet TO MacOS neXt. Steve is
> apparently paranoid about that because of security considerations.
> You are supposed to use ssh regardless of your actual external connections.

This is a *good* thing. Telnet sends your entire communication (including
your username and password) in plain text, so anyone who happened to
"eavesdrop" on your connection could later access the remote computer using
that account information. If that account is an admin-level account, they
basically have free reign. SSH, on the other hand, encrypts your password
info and all subsequent communication between the computers. There's nothing
you can do with Telnet that you can't do via SSH, so if the remote computer
supports SSH (like OS X) there's really no reason to use Telnet.

The other nice thing about SSH is that most computers running SSH also run
an SFTP server (Mac OS X does). This means that you can transfer files over
a secure, encrypted connection, instead of using FTP (which, like Telnet,
transmits everything via plain text).