I learned that telnet is not very useful anymore and I would never use it. Telnet is unencrypted plain text, and thus is inherently not very safe. Because of this, I have blocked all traffic on Port 23 (The port that telnet uses) incoming and outgoing, and have had it blocked for almost 2 1/2 years now on my local area network. I will never use Telnet. However, I have found that using SSH (Secure Shell) provides a great alternative to Telnet. I currently have SSH access to 11 different UNIX boxes for various different reasons. The main box I use SSH on is my own server which runs Slackware Linux in my basement. I use ssh-key encryption authentication. The hostname for my Linux box is bholcomb.org. I would also like to save the class another e-mail in their inbox and would like to reply to the thread about setting up your own telnet servers - i would like to chime in and say that you will NEVER want to leave your telnet server(s) open to the internet. You will always want to have some sort of firewall blocking port 23 so that people from the outside cannot use your telnet server to try and get into your machine. If they were to do that, they would own your machine and could do anything they wanted. Ben