Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!gauss.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: RFC's for telnet terminal speed and flow control Message-ID: Date: 15 Dec 88 20:03:29 GMT Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 31 Note that two new RFC's have just appeared, for telnet options to propagate terminal speed and to toggle flow control. These are intended to allow telnet to provide all of the features of rlogin. At this point we have a telnet and telnetd based on 4.3's versions that provide all of the features of rlogin except password-less login. (I'll be posting diffs shortly.) I'm holding off on password-less login until we complete our upgrade to SunOS 4.0. I hope that I can do something based on the new public key user validation present in 4.0. Rlogin's implementation of password-less login depends upon the BSD concept of privileged sockets. I don't see any obvious way of including that in a protocol intended for general use. During the review stage, one feature of the flow control RFC appeared somewhat controversial: the proposed line mode telnet option will also have provisions for handling flow control. The current RFC is intended to complete the set of facilities needed for reasonable character mode telnet. Line mode telnet will have to deal with a lot more parameters. Once line mode is negotiated on, I would assume it would handle flow control, echo, and everything else for itself. It would be nice to believe that character mode would simply die upon issuance of the line mode RFC. If you believe that, then it might seem unnecessary to be doing new options for character mode telnet. Unfortunately, line mode telnet is going to require kernel support. Past experience suggests that sites without source will have to wait years before they get support for it on all machines. A reasonable character mode telnet can be implemented with the facilities available in BSD 4.3, and possibly 4.2. (The issue with 4.2 is handling telnet sync. Without OOBINLINE it's not clear whether this can really be made to work. The 4.3 version of telnet tries to work on 4.2 systems. However our experience under SunOS 3.2 -- which uses BSD 4.2 networking -- was not entirely good. I ended up adding OOBINLINE to SunOS 3.2.)