Telnet negotiation - Not a defect: a feature!

[Pete Resnick]

karish at mindcrf.UUCP (Chuck Karish) writes:

>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.

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.

I know for a fact that Ultrix does telnet terminal-type negotiation.
Even when I log in from my Macintosh which runs its own little
telnet, whatever I set my terminal type to, whether it's 'vt100' or
'foobar', that's what my TERM variable is set to when I am logged in
on the VAX.

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
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