[plug] Incoming Telnet Priority

[craig at postnewspapers.com.au]

I must say, /usr/bin/telnet is wonderful. IDing servers, manual deletion
of POP3 mail when an idiot sends a 20mb attatchment (no longer a problem
for me but used to be), etc etc. I WILL NEVER USE IT TO ACCESS ANOTHER
MACHINE OVER THE INTERNET - EVER. Acceptable for admin of switches, etc,
on the same LAN segment, though.

Ssh is great, and vastly superior. But it is DIFFERENT as well. SSH is
not the cure-all for everything telnet can be used for, only its
original intended purpose.

On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 11:35:05AM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> 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!