Paranoid TelnetD

Paranoid TelnetD (also known as ptelnetd or Paranoid Telnet Daemon) is a command-line software, a non-interactive daemon that has been designed to implement a Ternet server with unique features.

First of all, we should mention that Paranoid TelnetD can be used with legacy of embedded devices, such as the hand-scanners that communicate via the Telnet protocol, usually used in warehouses.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for 'telnet only' user accounts, blacklisting and whitelisting of IP addresses, support for MAC addresses, user and real user authentication, support for variables, chrooting by using bind mounts, chhome support, a cool honeypot mode, support for dynamic home directories (dynhome), login and logout scripts, and support for the inetd daemon.

Among its command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘ptelnetd --help’ command in a terminal emulator, we can mention the ability to specify a port to run the service on, the path to the PID files, to restrict the service to a single network interface, to specify a comma separated list of authentication methods, as well as the path to a native authentication file.

Additionally, users will be able to specify a comma separated list with the users that are allowed to log in or whose access is denied, to specify a comma separated list of hosts that are allowed or denied, to specify a comma separated list of ethernet MAC addresses that are allowed or denied, choose a syslog level, to specify session idle timeout in seconds, and to write the text that will be displayed when a client is connected.

Getting started with Paranoid TelnetD

The software can be easily installed on any distribution of Linux, supported on 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms. To install it, download the latest version from Softoware, save the archive on your PC, unpack it, open the Terminal app, go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/paranoid-telnetd-0.4), execute the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile it, followed by the ‘make install’ command as root to install it.

What is new in this release:

• Bugfixes. 'shell' entry in auth files (/etc/ptelnetd.auth, /etc/passwd, etc) is now honored.