enabling telnet in vista
I tangoed with Vista on a new workstation batch we ordered at work. About 10 systems came in during a period where Dell would ONLY ship this line with Vista (they’ve changed this now). We ended up returning half of them and with the others formatting them back to XP using the OEM licensing structure. Why? Half of our software didn’t run on Vista and when we contacted our software vendors they said they had no plans in making Vista compatible programs for another year. Also the performance decrease for no actual gain (except the window flip interface in aero… *yawn* how *cute*). Basically people seemed a little ticked off at microsoft for this stunt.
My own workstation was one that I kept Vista, mostly because I didn’t have time to format it but I figured I’d be supporting it soon enough due to Microsoft’s strong arm tactics of forcing OS downgrades. One thing I noticed right away was telnet was missing. For the life of me I cannot figure out why one would disable the telnet protocol except that the stock telnet always sucked and maybe, just maybe a trojan could use the telnet app to reach out to something else (doubtful since a trojan will normally bring its own payload).
Anyways here is how one can enable telnet in vista.
1) Goto Control Panel
2) Click Programs (the renamed add/remove programs)
3) Turn windows Features On/Off
4) A window interface will pop up. You’ll want to scroll down this and select ‘telnet client’ and then select Ok.
Telnet is old, it is insecure but it is still used plenty day to day for testing things. Is the pop server responding, sure let me telnet in and check the banner.
I lasted about 2 months on vista then formatted back to XP