Telnet negotiation - Not a defect: a feature!

[Robin D. Wilson/1000000]

In article <1990Oct12.171007.14012 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> resnick at cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick) writes:
>karish at mindcrf.UUCP (Chuck Karish) writes:
>This is just not true. RFC 1091 is Telnet Terminal-Type negotiation,
>which IBM claims that AIX implements. When telnetd comes up, it sends
>an IAC DO TERMINAL-TYPE to the incoming telnet. If the incoming telnet
>answers appropriately, telnetd gets the text string for the terminal
>type from the incoming telnet. This should then be put in the TERM
>environment variable. Unfortunately, IBM has decided that the /bin/login,
>which executes after telnetd is done, look up the terminal type in
>/etc/ports and kludge whatever telnetd has set. This makes the implementing
>RFC 1091 absolutely useless.

This is correct.  And AIX v.2.2.1 telnetd does just this; however, the login 
process is what sets the terminal type, so it ignores what telnet negotiates.
This is not a "feature", it is an acknowledged restriction.  Meaning, it was
not intended to work this way, but the impact is too far reaching to make a
change now.  Changing the way the login process works would affect 3rd party
software designed around the "feature" of setting the terminal type to whatever
is set in /etc/ports.  Changing telnet to work around the problem makes the 
AIX v.2.2.1 version of telnet out of published specs, and completely 
non-standard.  We are between a rock and a hard place, and the best solution
in this case is to acknowledge the flaw, but leave it as-is so that we don't
create more problems.


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