2. Tribute: Musings over port 23
by Jeroen Offerijns & Max Peeperkorn
Description
Musings over port 23 is a small Telnet server which disrupts the computer which is in the middle of some activity. After a long time of Telnet inactivity, the computer is surprised by this new connection on port 23, it rambles off, telling you what it has been up in case someone might reconnect. In doing so, the computer is musing about Telnet and its characteristics. It might just have something up its sleeve you might not expect.
Motivation
Although we are not from generation Telnet, it is an important application in the history of computing and networking. Telnetting even became a verb. As we use its successor SSH almost daily, we found it neat to tell something about the history of remote access. Port 23 is destined to become a fossil of a once glorious protocol in the age of digital telecommunications. We are presenting a tribute where to computer muses – over a telnet session – about its role and the protocol.
Concept & Implementation
The project pays the tribute by reflecting on the things related to protocol and what remote access means. The reflection is presented by the computer in contrast to the usual use of telnet where you tell the computer what to do. There are two things to take into account when we talk about remote access in the context of Telnet. It is not just virtual connection, there is also a physical side. Namely, the location of the computer. In the musings of the computer we wrote a passage that makes the physical visible. The computer however doesn't really succeed as the medium only allows for text based communication.
To realize this project, we are running a small Telnet server with Node.js which presents the dialogue, which at times shows a video captured by a separate Python script, and then converted into either ASCII colors, in either black-and-white or color versions. Anyone with Telnet installed can – in theory – access the work.
Documentation
A short history of telnet://
Telnet, Teletype Network, was developed in the late 1960s and developed for remote control of computers within private networks and later also the public internet. It is primarily using the TCP networks on port 23. However, as Telnet precedes TCP/IP originally it was run over NCP networks.
The protocol is based upon the idea of a virtual teletype which uses a 7-bit ASCII character set. The emulation of the remote terminal provided the user with the ability to send all the characters on the virtual teletype over to the remote computer. It provides a text-based interactive session. Over the years’ this activity of using telnet to log into a remote computer became a verb.
Eventually, due to security reasons for public networks telnet was replaced by SSH. It still has it uses, but they are limited. In modern operating systems telnet not installed by default anymore.
References