Telnet

This week on BSD Now, a true Telnet BBS on, wait for it, a Casio calculator.

Some notes on software quality.

What the fuck happened to nerds? Uh, an ACPI layer has been added to VMD.

[laughs] Oh.

So starting off this week in the headlines, and speaking of things that make me smile, this was amazing.

This was, and I kid you not, a true Telnet BBS on a Casio calculator.

[lip smacks] Uh, so this is on ei3lh.eu, um, and this was written, um, not that long ago, August 14th.

So he says, "About eight weeks ago, I had virtually no interest in calculators.

But how do you talk to it securely over a network? Like, if I rent a server in a data center halfway across the world, I can't just plug a keyboard into it.

Historically, administrators solved this using a network protocol called Telnet.

Yeah.

It was fast, it was simple, and it allowed you to type commands remotely.

It transmitted every piece of data in plain text.

Mm.

Meaning if I was typing my administrator password over Telnet, anyone sitting on a router between me and the server with packet sniffing software like Wireshark could just read my password as it floated by.

Precisely.

And what that led to was the network security nightmares.

So the early 2000s was there was a bunch of stuff plugged into the internet that has a bunch of default services running, like Finger and Telnet and all these other weird Windows file sharing things.

They're all on the internet suddenly, and now we need to batten that down to hatches, add firewalls, close ports, get everybody to do system security correctly.

This reminds me of that, right? Like, when they invented Ethernet and they gave us all switches and routers, like, they didn't know that they would create this massive security problem, but it did.

So around the time Windows 3 came out with networking, I think it was a later 3 variant, had the first Microsoft network code in here.

You could be talking on that using Telnet, using FTP.

You could do all these amazing things talking to what by that stage was mainly Unix systems because all these other operating systems had kind of withered on the vine a bit.

The world was exploding into a universe of people running pretty much the same design powered by Unix.

And syslogd has some various memory leak fixes.

And Telnet, if you're still one of the few people running that [laughs] for some reason, fixed telnet -l lowercase l telnetd, um, asking for authentication twice.

And yeah, bumping up some of the third party components to more recent versions.

So you've got Xorg, OpenSSL, SSH, uh, Unbound, uh, tzdata, and XKBCOMP has been updated to 1.5.0.

Uh- I can understand if it's a, say you're making some sort of embedded device-

Yeah

... and it has to do some internal local host connecting or something like that for Telnet deep, but certainly wouldn't want to be using that in production these days.

Yeah.

The whole thing was created in 1993 when I was in college.

So before that, you're like, well, we got Telnet.

What are we going to do, folks?

Yep.

Gopher, Archie.

Yep.

Telnet.

Oh my gosh.

It's normally not open.

So you go into the configuration protocol and said, now I need to have, let's say, Telnet open, an example.

and you think it's really cool, and next week I might do some other maintenance, so, you know, rather than close it down, I'm going to have it open.

Over the time, there's a lot of small changes, and each add up to all the others, and that basically means that the protocol you and I, or the profile you and I was expecting, because when we set it up, have slowly been drifting.

So we actually, one of the guys, he actually built a scanner by himself and it's, to be fair and honest, it's not a scanner.

It basically just do a really pure three-way NTP handshake.

So the only thing we actually do is that we send, let's say, Telnet, we'd send a full three-way handshake on the Telnet port so we don't break stuff.

That's a big difference because normally the problem with, in example, using Nmap, would be the way NMAF normally works.