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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
commonly 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.
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