Bug 100984 – Telnet is missing from the live CD

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Account Removed 2005-08-01 04:41:30 UTC]

The Live CD is a useful toolbox for system recovery, as well as installation and
testing. However, it lacks a widely used tool: the telnet client.

For most purposes, SSH is a better and more secure alternative, however it is
not always available on the network, and telnet is too ubiquitous to ignore.

I use telnet for at least two purposes:

1. Connecting to Cisco routers on the local network. They don't have SSH, and
local network design/security is best left to the network admins, not Gentoo
developers.

2. Connecting to web servers and viewing the HTTP headers. If I want to see what
my web server is doing, I might do something like telnet my-server.com 80 then
HEAD /page/script.php HTTP/1.0 etc. etc.

If you don't have the time or the means to include telnet, fine. If you want to
name the binary telnet-insecure, fine.

But please include this very useful tool.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

[Comment 1 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-08-01 05:15:18 UTC]

Well, any recent version of IOS support ssh, so that isn't even a consideration.
 Also, we don't want to encourage the use of insecure protocols.  The second we
add telnet to the release media, we'll have another bug report asking us to
remove it.

Also, the media is not intended as a recovery tool or as a full environment.  It
is designed for installing Gentoo, and that is it.

Now, there will be netcat on the full experimental LiveCD for x86, coming with
2005.1, but that is much more general-purpose and useful than telnet.  Anyway,
you can add yourself to bug #57757 to track that, or simply wait until 2005.1 is
released, and use netcat.