Re: Telnet Confusion (was Re: CUPS, Alpine, and printserving : telnet weirdness)

This is the second half of a reply to Craig White's post below, put into a new thread because it has departed so far from the original topic. I'm discovering great new stuff -- new to me, that is -- and I want to draw maximal attention to it from others who may be in shoes like mine. On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:08:11 -0700, Craig White wrote: [...] > I fear that you still don't get it. > > This is a rather cool blog about 'Trivial uses for Telnet'... > http://evolvedcode.net/content/doc_alttelnet/ > > which talks about how to use telnet client application to connect to a > web server or a pop3 server or an smtp server and talk to the server as > if you were just another application communicating with that server so > you can test things out or just familiarize yourself with the process > itself. Indeed! I just sang its praises in the first half of this reply, on the original thread. > Obviously telnet to the cups port (631) is very much similar as the > others (SMTP/POP3/HTTP) except that like the others, the cups server has > its own vocabulary. Ah, if only I had known, back when I was teaching baby language courses, what vast argots the various branches of Computer Science would develop -- once it came into existence, of course. > In essence, every time you open a web browser and tell it to go to a > specific web site, you are doing something similar to opening a > connection to that web site with telnet on port 80 (ignoring of course > the web browser rendering engine, javascript, etc.). Ignoring a lot of things I wouldn't know if they bit me never mind where, to be sure. But in the present context, there seem to be some I can't ignore -- some that (afaict) reflect the settings on my terminal, and some that are apparently matters of notation and vocabulary. Thus for instance, following along the second paragraph, about NetCat -- or rather, trying to follow -- I get this : ===== ===== ===== ===== telnet> NC -v -v {address} {port}^[[D^[[D^[[D^H^H^H^H^H^[[3~^C [btth@Hbsk ~]$ telnet telnet> ^[[A^[[D^C [btth@Hbsk ~]$ NC -v -v 192.168.0.8 631 bash: NC: command not found [btth@Hbsk ~]$ telnet telnet> NC -v -v 192.168.0.8 631 ?Invalid command telnet> NC -v -v {192.168.0.8} {631} ?Invalid command telnet> ===== ===== ===== ===== If only by trial and error, I think I can set up a different terminal emulation (xterm instead of my usual gnome terminal, for instance, which is configured primarily for Alpine), and avoid all that gibberish caused by trying to use the backspace and arrow keys. But it isn't obvious to me, unless I haven't had enough coffee yet, why the last two commands are both invalid. All that's obvious is that, despite Mr. Welsh's exemplary lucidity, I am reading his text otherwise than he expects.