Resolve a telnet problem from Cisco routers to OS X

Sep 29, '03 09:25:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I have a need to telnet into my OS X 10.2.8 machine from a Cisco router. I enabled telnet support in inetd.conf, and tests from other OS X and FreeBSD machines worked fine. However, trying to login from the Cisco (IOS 12.3.1) didn't work; as soon as I entered a username, the session hung.

The fix proved to be adding the -k option to the telnetd invocation:

     -k           This option is only useful if telnetd has been compiled with
                  both linemode and kludge linemode support.  If the -k option
                  is specified, then if the remote client does not support the
                  LINEMODE option, then telnetd will operate in character at a
                  time mode.  It will still support kludge linemode, but will
                  only go into kludge linemode if the remote client requests
                  it.  (This is done by by the client sending DONT
                  SUPPRESS-GO-AHEAD and DONT ECHO.)  The -k option is most
                  useful when there are remote clients that do not support
                  kludge linemode, but pass the heuristic (if they respond
                  with WILL TIMING-MARK in response to a DO TIMING-MARK) for
                  kludge linemode support.
By the way, the man page for telnetd doesn't appear to be correct - it covers some different options than telnetd accepts or lists if you run telnetd from the command line.

Comments (0)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030928052224914