I recently downloaded inetutils-1.4.0.tar.gz, in an attempt to fix some
persistently screwy behavior in the telnetd of 1.3.2g, which I had
previously installed. I'll get into that later. The only reason I got it
in the first place was for the telnetd, so the fact that it doesn't work is
rather disconcerting. I compiled using gcc 3.0.3 and GNU make 3.79.1 on
Core Linux (http://coredistro.sourceforge.net).
Trying to run telnetd from inetd with arguments of telnetd and -h, which
had worked with 1.3.2g (if screwily), produced precisely
nothing. Executing telnetd by hand with the -debug option produced
"telnetd: unknown command line option: d" and executing it manually just
plain produced nothing. Every attempt to connect via telnet from the
windows machine sitting next to that machine failed, connection refused.
The screwy behavior that 1.3.2g had exhibited previously was more
interesting. It did several things I don't understand. It didn't use
Unix98 ptys, which the kernel was compiled with (and screen uses without
blinking), it didn't log users out when they logged out (they still showed
up to 'who' queries), it reset the user's $PATH with each login, and when
using su, left the command prompt as $ even when acting as the
superuser. All of these things worked correctly (with the exception of the
Unix98 ptys, of course) on the physical terminal.
Does *anyone* have any idea what the problem is and/or was, and more
importantly, how one could go about fixing it? Any help at all would be
much appreciated.