What is "remote login"? What is the standard protocol which
provides remote login on the Internet?
What are some of the characteristics of the TELNET NVT?
The TELNET NVT defines a standard "end-of-line" convention whereby
lines of text are delimited using the two character ASCII control code sequence
<CR><LF> (in English: Carriage Return followed by Line Feed). Why do
you suppose the designers of the protocol adopted this two character sequence
instead of just a single character <CR>, or a <LF>, or something
else entirely?
The Network Virtual Terminal approach used by TELNET protocol
means that servers and clients don't need to know the details of
the actual terminal or host (if any) at the other end of the connection.
The alternative is to perform terminal emulation. What
is meant by terminal emulation?
The notion of how the NVT is used in Telnet leads on to a
(moderately) serious philosophical
discussion about how to map the requirements of different kinds of computer
systems to one another when you need to perform some kind of Networked
Computing function. Start by comparing the TELNET NVT approach to terminal
emulation, and extend the discussion to the more general case.
When the telnet program starts up,
it informs the user as follows:
ironbark 27> telnet redgum
Trying 149.144.21.3...
Connected to redgum.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
What is the "escape character" used for?
The[1] text file for
RFC 854
(the TELNET protocol specification) contains exactly 854 lines.
Do you think there is cosmic significance in this?
Why do they call it "anonymous" FTP if the server insists on
your email address as a password?
The FTP protocol has two different modes of
operation: text and binary, or image.
What do you think is the difference between these two
modes? What does RFC 959 have
to say on the matter?
Explain why a binary mode FTP transfer of a PC (or Macintosh) text
file to a Unix system (or vice versa) results in a (slightly)
corrupted file.
Why does the control connection in FTP need to use the TELNET
NVT specification?
BSD Unix introduced a file transfer utility called rcp,
analogous to rlogin. What does this do?
(Research question) How does TELNET perfom option negotiation?