Danny Howard wrote:
Anthony,
"Securely" and "telnet" is an oxymoron. This is mainly because any
data, including passwords, sent through a non-encrypted connection,
can be sniffed by anyone who can access any of the intervening
networks. Your question is really very open-ended and vague. The
correct question may be "I need to facilitate FOO." and then go about
solving that. When you ask "I need to do something with telnet," I am
inclined to say "I bet you are asking the wrong question."
One (easier) way is to use a traditional login shell and set the
config file to pass execution to your application. For example, if
the user is set to use csh, you can put "exec fooprog" in his .login.
An advantage of this is that you can set environment variables and
stuff before handing execution to this application. If you do this,
and you can not trust your user (he's using telnet, so his password is
easy to steal,) then you want to look at how your development system
handles signals. You don't want him sending some clever signal to
your system that lets them sneak out in to something else.
That said, if you set a user's shell (See /etc/master.passwd and the
excellent pw program,) to your executable, then that is the program
that will be executed as the user's login shell.
(I once set up a user on my system to launch freeciv on the remote
terminal so some friends and I could play this game in my dorm
laboratory from the workstation in my dorm room. I think I just set
the shell init file to "exec freeciv" and disabled the user when we
weren't playing games. :)
Another way is to put the program in inetd.conf ... you just telnet to
some port, and things happen. This is like putting the program in as
the user shell, but there are fewer insecure layers (telnet tends to
have security advisories crop up) but you wont have telnet asking for
a password for you.
Anyway, good luck.
Sincerely,
-danny
Also keep in mind that starting an SSH tunnel can allow you to do many
things also. One that comes to mind (and I think the handbook explains
it) is mail. Setting up routines that make use of an SSH tunnel is not
hard to do.
Best regards,
Chris
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