Re: Telnet IS a backdoor
Dear gawd, with every post you demonstrate your ignorance!
1. You clearly don't know what a reserved port *is*, and have no idea what /etc/services *is* used for. A reserved port can only be opened by a process running as root. That's it. It has nothing to do with inetd or xinetd or anything else, as evidenced that port 80 is reserved, too.
2. As it happens, yes, if you manually start in.telnet without the debug option it will exit, because it doesn't have a socket open. But as you yourself acknowledge, if you start it with the debug option, it will run. Hence your entire thesis that there's no such thing as a telnet server crashes and burns, because, as you acknowledge, starting in.telnetd with the debug option IS A TELNET SERVER!
3. If you start in.telnetd manually, it will wait for a connection for a while; this duration is defined as the time until someone kills it (e.g. as part of a system shutdown).
4. I didn't actually say it forked a shell, I said it forked a subshell; a subprocess or coprocess would have been more accurate. Yes, sloppy language on my part, but as you know, you can't technically fork a shell. The rest of your comment, though, contains a serious factual error on your part (execve has no default shell...), so I'm not loosing sleep in the face of your self-aggrandizement.
5. Which means that about half are implemented, which means that someone who claims that telnet isn't a protocol isn't a smart as he thinks he is....
6. I'd bet most of the telnet advocates here, as you call them, have used telnet to connect to other services. It's a totally routine technique for detecting whether the service is accessible...
Now run along. You've demonstrated your ignorance and shifting positions quite adequately, and I doubt anyone is terribly interested in your "wisdom" anymore...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
