Re: in.telnetd bug (linux)

Ryan Murray (rmurray@LIGHTSPEED.BC.CA)
Tue, 02 Dec 1997 11:08:42 -0800

On Mon, 1 Dec 1997, Patrick wrote:

> Re-installing the newest netkit on a broken system doesn't fix the bug,
> nor does installing the same netkit (even the same binary) on a working

NetKit's documentation clearly indicates this problem in the
netkit-telnet-0.10/BUGS file:

- crashes in ncurses if the terminal type is undefined,
with some versions of ncurses.

> Installing the terminfo.tgz package fixes the bug. After some
> investigation, I found that it's more specifically the existence of the
> /usr/lib/terminfo/u/unknown file that fixes the bug.

Hrm...I have /usr/lib/terminfo/u/unknown. I checked the code for telnetd,
and it actually assumes "network" and not unknown, which I don't have.
Adding a link from "network" to dumb didn't solve the problem. telnetd
simply dies before outputting anything (no core, because processes started
from inetd aren't allowed to core, of course)