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MacTelnet 3.0a13 (Freeware) Although the graphical nature of the Mac OS doesn't lend itself well to command-line interaction, there are other systems, most notably the many flavors of UNIX, that still provide services via the Telnet protocol. A Telnet client is also useful for debugging other types of services, if you know what port they are on. Until Mac OS X comes along, Mac OS users need a separate Telnet application. MacTelnet is one of the latest Telnet clients for the Mac OS. One thing you can use it for is to access the Telnet information sources that still seem to be out there on the Net. If you do a search of any popular search engine and specify 'telnet resources' you should get quite a few matches. The available info is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice to say there are government, education and commercial offerings.
One Example of a Service Available via Telnet But the fun is just beginning. You can also interact with many text-based Internet services that reside on other ports. After entering the name of the computer to connect to, follow it with a colon and the number of the port to connect to. Some common ones are SMTP e-mail on port 25, and NNTP news on 119. You'll find others if you do some digging. This is a great way to understand the inner working of Internet protocols.
Interacting Directly with a News Server To round things out, an FTP server is in the works. This software is still a work in progress, but new versions have been coming out on a frequent basis, so we hope to see this functionality working soon. Have any other Mac OS Internet Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via e-mail, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum. Useful Link Search HyTelnet for Telnet Resources |
