telnetd vs telnetd -a


 
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Old 07-21-2006
telnetd vs telnetd -a

Hi folks. I have a quick question on using "telnetd" vs. "telnetd -a".

OS: AIX 5.x (5.1 through 5.3 ML3)

Some engineers at work want to stop using "telnetd -a" and use "telnetd".
(and of course, if I could get a cogent answer from them, I wouldn't be posting this question...) Smilie

The man page for telnetd suggests that "telnetd -a" offers improved performance as follows:

-a Causes the PTY and socket to be linked directly in the kernel so that the data handling remains in the kernel to improve the performance.

I don't see a security issue here, so I'm guessing that there might be a memory issue related to this.

Barring a call to IBM (which I'm about to make), does anyone have a quick answer as to why *not* to use -a, or which option is preferred? Smilie

Thanks!

-Dave
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tels(7) 						 Miscellaneous Information Manual						   tels(7)

NAME
tels, telm - STREAMS Telnet slave (pseudo-terminal) driver, STREAMS Telnet master driver (used by telnetd only), respectively SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
A Telnet pseudo-terminal consists of a tightly-coupled pair of character devices, called the master device and slave device. The master and slave device drivers work together to provide a Telnet connection on the server side where the master provides a connection to and the slave provides a terminal device special file access for the Telnet application processes, as depicted below: -------------------------- | Pseudo terminal functions| Application <--> |--------------------------| <--> telnetd Processes | Slave | Master | | (tels) | (telm) | -------------------------- The slave driver, with (STREAMS pty emulation module) and (STREAMS line discipline module) pushed on top (not shown for simplicity), pro- vides a terminal interface as described in termio(7). Whereas devices that provide the terminal interface described in termio(7) have a hardware device behind them; in contrast, the slave device has manipulating it through the master side of the Telnet pseudo terminal. There are no nodes in the file system for each individual master device. Rather, the master driver is set up as a STREAMS clone(7) driver with its major device number set to the major for the clone driver and its minor device number set to the major for the driver. The master driver is opened by telnetd using the open(2) system call with as the device file parameter. The clone open finds the next available minor number for the master device. The master device is available only if it and its corresponding slave device are not already opened. In order to use the STREAMS Telnet subsystem, a node for the master driver and N number of Telnet slave devices must be installed. The number of slave devices is set by a kernel tunable parameter called This can be modified using SAM; its default and minimum value is 60. The value of is the upper limit of the number of telnet sessions that can be opened. Multiple opens are allowed on the Telnet slave device. The master and slave drivers pass all STREAMS messages to their adjacent drivers. When the connection is closed from the Telnet client side, an message is sent to the corresponding slave device which will render that slave device unusable. The process on the slave side gets the errno when attempting a write(2) system call to the slave device file but it will be able to read any data remaining in the slave stream. Finally, when all the data has been read, the read(2) system call will return 0, indicating that the slave can no longer be used. AUTHOR
and were developed by HP. FILES
Streams Telnet master clone device Streams slave devices where N is the minor number of the slave device and 0 < N < SEE ALSO
insf(1M), open(2), ioctl(2), streamio(7), ldterm(7), telnetd(1M), ptem(7). tels(7)