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From: owen@astro.washington.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Telnet problems...
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.205921.21370@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 91 20:59:21 GMT
References: <1991Jun25.083813.4155@lth.se>
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News)
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Organization: University of Washington
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Good luck finding a really reliable Telnet program. I don't think a really good
one exists yet.

The best thing I've found is VersaTerm ($100 mail-order). It is very reliable,
and well-supported. But I find its TCP/IP stuff clumsy (for instance Telnet
doesn't yet support multiple sessions, though it will in a future release). The
basic problem with it is it used to be a serial-only communications program,
and the new TCP/IP stuff hasn't been integrated in as well as it might
(esthetically speaking). But it works, and is reasonably priced
(about $100 mail-order, I think).

VersaTerm also comes with an FTP server. I've just started using it, but so far
looks MUCH better than the one built into NCSA Telnet. NCSA's server only
operates while you have NCSA Telnet running, and worse yet, it fails with most
standard Mac ftp clients, such as XFerIt, HyperFTP, and VersaTerm's FTP
Client). It also has worse security (VT allows you to restrict any user to
read-only access; NCSA doesn't).

VersaTerm is extremely well supported, and has first-rate VT-220 and Tek 4014
emulation. The fancy-graphics version, called VersaTerm PRO, also has Tek 4105
emulation (very nice) and uses vectors for its graphics, so they print better
and xfer to other apps better.

The second-best thing I've found is NCSA Telnet 2.4B11 (12 has slow font
problems, but otherwise is also fine); it's MUCH more reliable than the version
2.3. You might try it before spending money, but if you're doing much
mac-to-mac ftp, I'd spring for VersaTerm in any case!

I've also tried Intercon's TCP/Connect II. It looked promising -- it has a
better interface than VersaTerm -- but the ftp crashed constantly on me. This
may be a quirk -- others have claimed the program is reliable and
well-supported -- but tech support was no help to me, so I sent it back (30 day
money-back gurantee). I also didn't like the big-ugly-monolithic program
approach. Mail, news, ftp, and telnet are all combined in one program, making a
 mess of the menus (and command-key equivelents!).

-- Russell

P.S. a VT hint: lock the HOST file, so VT looks up the address each time;
otherwise VT will archive the IP address in the HOST file.