Re: [cobalt-users] wish to Cobalt: suppressing "sensitive"information

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 9/19/00 10:03 AM, Dom Latter at d.latter@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Kris Dahl wrote:
>> 
>> I also wish that people would get the terminology right--that is not
>> 'telnet' access, but 'shell' access you are talking about.  Telnet is a
>> client, server, & protocol.
> 
> It's very common.  A colleague (with a fair amount of Clue) asked the
> other day "since when has telnet been HTTP?".  I gave him instructions
> for trying it out.
> 
> In fact, to get on-topic - here's the tip.
> 
> "telnet abc.def.ghi.jkl 80" at a shell on another machine.
> Then type "GET / HTTP/1.0" and return a couple of times.
> You should get the raw HTML stream back.  This is a
> very useful diagnostic, as there is no application in the way
> trying to interpret for you.

Telnet is a multi-purpose tool.  You can connect to various ports and send
plain text to them, and get various responses.

HTTP is a description of this method.  Same with FTP for the most part.
Only instead of using a 'telnet' client, we use a 'web browser' or 'ftp
client'.

So while telnet is a good multi-purpose tool, it is *not* a good tool for
remote shell administration.  Nor is FTP for authenticated remote file
transfer.

-k