Lecture 3: Applications #1: Intro and Telnet

Other Aspects of Remote Login

Programs which implement the telnet protocol are widely (and freely) available, and telnet is much used.

The BSD version of Unix introduced (in the mid 1980s) a remote login utility with enhanced characteristics called "rlogin." Some of its features are:

It supports the idea of "trusted" hosts, whereby a remote login request from a trusted host (providing the usernames match) is not re-authenticated. This can be administered on a per-host basis (/etc/hosts.equiv) or a per-user basis (~/.rhosts).
rlogin exports the user's local "login environment" to the remote host, so that an rlogin session can look almost identical to a local login.

Nowadays, computer users who wish to use remote login facilities normally use a "secure" software package such as "ssh" (for "Secure SHell"). This software encrypts (for security, see later) and compresses the data (for efficiency) before sending it to the remote host. If you actually want to do remote login nowadays, you should always use ssh!

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