Telnet negotiation - Not a defect: a feature!

[Pete Resnick]

Well, the good old saying "We're IBM; we don't have to!" has finally
come up and bit me. In the TCP/IP documentation for AIX 2.2.1, the
telnet and telnetd sections explain that telnet on the RT handles
terminal negotiation. But any time I log in over telnet, my terminal
type gets set to whatever is in /etc/ports. I call IBM defect support
who quickly explain to me that this is not a defect, but in fact a
feature!!!! Geez, just what I always wanted. According to them, telnet
does in fact do terminal negotiation; it's just that /bin/login stomps
over the terminal type and makes it whatever is in /etc/ports. And
defect support says that, because it was designed to work that way,
changing would be a "design change" and not a "corrective service."

Some days are just not as funny as others.

So, here is my question: Can someone there in IBM-land who might be
working for the TCP/IP group write a little piece of code so that
terminal negotiation can be done after /bin/login has finished its
dirty work? That is, I would like a little program that sends the
IAC DO TERMINAL-TYPE and gets the response back that I can put in
/etc/environment or /etc/profile. I have given up on the idea of
getting this to work to spec (I don't care whether defect support
believes it does; it's not working the way it ought to, even though
it works the way it is supposed to). I just want something that does
the job. I don't even know if you can do terminal negotiation this
late in the game; maybe setting an environmet variable like NETTERM.
Anything.


Alternatively, does someone know how I can do this through official
channels. No offense, but I do not have a great deal of faith going
through the front lines of the office here in Champaign; I will be
gone by the time a real design change goes through.

Thanks for any help.
pr

--
Pete Resnick             (...so what is a mojo, and why would one be rising?)
Graduate assistant - Philosophy Department, Gregory Hall, UIUC
System manager - Cognitive Science Group, Beckman Institute, UIUC
Internet/ARPAnet/EDUnet  : resnick at cogsci.uiuc.edu
BITNET (if no other way) : FREE0285 at UIUCVMD