Setting Up a Telnet Server

Having been superseded by SSH, you will find the Telnet server installation packages under Legacy Network Server in the Add or Remove Packages dialog box. You need to select it from the Details selection because it is not one of the default selections for the package group. Once installed, select System Settings, Server Settings, Services and enable Telnet for runlevel 5. Note your IP address while you are here (switch to root and run ifconfig).

With that done, you can now fire up your other Linux box and type telnet <your IP>. You are prompted to enter your username and password. The whole conversation should look like this:

 [paul@susannah ~]$ telnet 10.0.0.1 Trying 10.0.0.1... Connected to 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) Escape character is '^]'. Welcome to Caitlin Running Fedora Core * All access is logged * login: paul Password: Last login: Sat Jul 9 12:05:41 from 10.0.0.5 [paul@caitlin ~]$ 

TIP

Note that the server responds with Welcome to Caitlin, running Fedora Core, which is a customized message. Your machine will probably respond with Fedora Core 4 and your kernel version. This is insecure: giving away version numbers is never a smart move. In fact, even saying Fedora is questionable. Edit the issue and issue.net files in your /etc directory to change these messages.

Running the w command now shows you as connecting from the external IP address.