*BSD News Article 41053


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From: gcarlson@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Gary Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Telnetd bug
Date: 15 Jan 1995 18:10:08 -0700
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <3fch1g$g41@nyx10.cs.du.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: nyx10.cs.du.edu


I recently installed FreeBSD 2.0 on a 486-based machine.  A very annoying
problem has cropped up in network connections that I have yet to
explain.  This problem (which will be described shortly) did not appear
when the same release was operated on a 386-40 machine.

Problem:

Networking software like NCSA telnet or PCTCP running on DOS machines
most of the time fails to negotiate proper terminal characteristics
when logging into the server running FreeBSD.  What usually happens
is local/remote echo gets messed up causing the link to double echo
or not echo at all.  Additionally,the majority of time it jumps into
line-by-line mode, forcing the use of a carriage return to send any
command.  This poses the most problems with software that only
expects a single character (i.e. the unix "more" command).  To
compound the problem, it isn't repeatable from one session to the
next.  Sometimes it double echoes, sometimes not.  Sometimes single
key sequences work, sometimes they need a carriage return to take
effect. . . 

At this point, I doubt the NCSA or PCTCP software has the problem,
because it communicates flawlessly with so many other computers on
the Internet.  NCSA telnet for the Macintosh so far is the only
software that is able to negotiate a successful link with the machine
which has left me even more baffled.  The only thing I suspect is that
the telnet daemon has a not-so-obvious bug.

I would be most gracious to someone who can propose a fix to this problem.
The system seems to work almost flawlessly with the exception of this
problem (and maybe the man pages running too slow).

Gary Carlson (gcarlson@realm.net or gcarlson@nyx10.cs.du.edu)