[plug] Incoming Telnet Priority

[William Kenworthy]

There's actually an extensive list of things that telnet can do that ssh
seemingly cant starting with machines that have no ssh deamon (and
cannot have one installed), to checking ports such as mail, to company
firewalls that only allow telnet gateways that they can monitor (refer
to the Mandrake list for an extensive list of uses and reasons after the
recent flames by intollerant ssh evangelists!)  And telnet is used on a
lot of communications devices besides desktop computers.

This particularly applies to this intended use.  On my previous system,
which suffered from a similar problem at times (dissappeared after one
kernel upgrade, reason unknown!), ssh would ALWAYS fail to log in,
probably due to the extra overhead.  Telnet mostly succeeded, but was
dismally slow.  Wish I'd thought of this trick with nice at the time!

BillK


On Fri, 2001-11-23 at 11:04, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Thursday 22 November 2001 23:48, Andrew Simmonds wrote:
> > I occasionally have processes (mozilla hacking usually) that like to eat
> > all my memory, swap and cpu power compleatly (malloc loop for example).
> > Anyone know of a way to increase the priority of an incoming telnet
> > connection so that I can log in and kill it?
> 
> Run your telnet daemon with nice -5
> 
> If you're coming in through inetd or xinetd instead of directly to a daemon, 
> you'll need to run that at a lower niceness (higher nastiness?) level and 
> nice 0 anything it spawns except telnet.
> 
> PS, don't use telnet, use ssh. AFAICT there's nothing that telnet can do that 
> ssh can't, and a heck of a lot that ssh can do (particularly in the area of 
> security, surprise) that telnet can't. A good ssh client for Windows, should 
> you need one, is PuTTY (search Google for it).
> 
> Cheers; Leon
>