The rlogin protocol, described in
RFC 1282,
is a simple remote login protocols. It's comparable to the telnet
protocol, but rlogin is as primitive as telnet is complex.
rlogin servers can generally be configured to allow a passwordless
login, through .rhost files in the home directory. telnet
servers typically do not provide such a possibilty (which is
a security risk, unless you exactly know what you are doing).
BeOS lacks out-of-band message handling, which the rlogin
server uses to signal the client that it should do something special
(change XON/XOFF mode, send terminal size). Out-of-band messages
are mixed in the normal data stream, and there's no perfect way to
recognize them out - unlike telnet rlogin doesn't have a special
escape sequence prefix for the OOB data.
This client tries to somehow hack around this, but since the special
characters are 0x02 (ctrl-B), 0x10 (ctrl-P), 0x20 (the main problem:
this is the space char) and 0x80 (nothing special), this cannot be
done perfectly.
What happens?
sometimes a superfluous space will be seen.
Ignore, it's only on this screen.
sometimes escape sequences may be garbled
(you may see "[nn;xxm" on the screen). Ignore too.
Both misfeatures most often happen while you edit a text, text
editors (even vi clones, elvis is worse in this regards than vim)
tend to make the server send OOBs.
Anyway:
this affects only the output, not what you send.
output can be redrawn with `^L' (ctrl-L).
some of the I/O handling options are not implemented (litout
mode, i never saw a use of it).
7bit mode is implemented, but ISTRIP is ignored by BeOS (
why the heck?)
due to the OOB hacks this client _cannot_ be used for
applications which need a clean data stream - zmodem comes
to mind.
Why do i publish this?
It's somewhat usable, really. It's just not perfect.
And if you hate to type in your password too often - like me -
then is program might save you.
It's good enough for me to connect to my lines machine and read news
with trn, mail with mutt and use ssh to connect to the world.