Telnet negotiation - Not a defect: a feature!

[Chuck Karish]

In article <1990Oct8.192405.19439 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
resnick at cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick) wrote:
>But any time I log in over telnet, my terminal
>type gets set to whatever is in /etc/ports.

Later, he added:

>If there is no entry in /etc/ports, it sets it to 'dumb'.
>
>Dumb.

UNIX systems maintain information about the terminal type in the
shell, not in the terminal driver.  Telnet itself doesn't know
what the terminal type is, and therefore can't do the negotiation.
It's been done this way since telnet was first provided on BSD
systems, as far as I know; AIX behavior does not differ from
historical practice.

The rlogin protocol does propagate the $TERM variable from the
environment.  This is the only environment variable from the
local shell that's provided to the remote shell.

When your terminal type comes up as `dumb', there are two things
you can have your session initialization script (.cshrc, .profile, etc.)
do:

- Prompt you to fill in the correct terminal type, and set it
  in $TERM (and $term, in csh).

- Run a program to probe the terminal for an identification code;
  many terminals can report what type they are.
-- 

	Chuck Karish		karish at mindcraft.com
	Mindcraft, Inc.		(415) 323-9000