Telnet tool not found

Q&A
1

I installed the telnet tool using following command:

sudo swupd bundle-add netkit-telnet

but when I run command:

telnet IP PORT

the output is:

zsh: command not found: telnet

any suggestions?

2

I see the same. I suspect that Telnet is deprecated in favor of SSH, although I understand that there are situations where you may need to use Telnet. I’ll see if I can get a definitive answer from the team and get the bundle either fixed or removed.

3

Looks like the bundle was deprecated last month, so if you really, really had to, you could download the bundle from a previous release and install it with rpm.

download
netkit-telnet-0.17-3.x86_64.rpm 30-Nov-2021 17:57 6552
netkit-telnet-abi-0.17-3.x86_64.rpm 30-Nov-2021 17:57 6244
netkit-telnet-bin-0.17-3.x86_64.rpm 30-Nov-2021 17:57 58703
netkit-telnet-license-0.17-3.x86_64.rpm 30-Nov-2021 17:57 8126
netkit-telnet-man-0.17-3.x86_64.rpm 30-Nov-2021 17:57 15960

sudo swupd bundle-add package-utils
sudo rpm -i netkit-telnet-* --nodeps
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl






                                              /~\                        
                                             |oo )      Well I'm not     
                                             _\=/_       going that      
                             ___            /  _  \         way!         
                            /() \          //|/.\|\\                     
                          _|_____|_       ||  \_/  ||                    
                         | | === | |      || |\ /| ||                    
                         |_|  O  |_|       # \_ _/  #                    
                          ||  O  ||          | | |                       
                          ||__*__||          | | |                       
                         |~ \___/ ~|         []|[]                       
                         /=\ /=\ /=\         | | |                       
       \_________________[_]_[_]_[_]________/_]_[_\______________________

But I would strongly recommend against it due to security concerns.

Chris

2 Likes
4
5

Seems a bit silly to deprecate it. It still has uses. In homelabs, it can be hard to get used enterprise switches that even support SSH, or to get it work with SSH (due to severely outdated ciphers - I have a switch where the very latest firmware that is even available is from 2012, and some SSH clients don’t even support the ciphers it uses with special arguments anymore), whereas telnet still works. I’m slowly phasing all of my used enterprise network gear out in favour of MikroTik, but that takes time and money. Managed switches aren’t cheap :stuck_out_tongue:

I totally got here by googling btw, trying to figure out how to install Telnet on Clear Linux*

1 Like