Telnet

Telnet is the main Internet protocol for creating a connection with a remote machine. It gives the user the opportunity to be on one computer system and do work on another, which may be across the street, or thousands of miles away.

Using Telnet

You need a program to access telnet. You can use telnet by either dialing directly into our service using a standard terminal dialer and using our UNIX-based telnet client, or by connecting in the usual way. Then load a special telnet application, such as NetTerm, PowerTerm, or HyperTerminal (Private Edition), or other telnet capable program.

The actual command for negotiating a telnet connection varies from system to system. The most common used command, however, is "telnet" itself. It takes the form of: telnet somewhere.domain

We'll use our local system as a working example. To open the connection, type:

telnet eticomm.net

The system will respond with something similar to

Trying 204.213.252.2...
Connected to eticomm.net
Escape character is '^]'

The escape character, in this example ^] (Control-]), is the character that will let you go back to the local system to close the connection, suspend it, etc.

If you are not familiar with using UNIX commands, you may want to take a look at our Basic UNIX commands. One thing to keep in mind with telnet and the UNIX environment is that EVERYTHING is case sensitive.