On Thu, 2011-08-18 at 20:15 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote: > Oh ... it may be clear to you and others that are familiar with this > but > I didn't know ... I just thought I could run telnet and give it a > port > number to use. I was aware that some ports may not like it (as I > discovered with telnet <name> 22), but this is my first round of > dealing > with ports and I cannot begin to tell you how appreciative I am that > the > replies I am getting are longer rather than shorter to make sure I > can > understand the "why" of the suggstions. ---- of course - you have it right. telnet is simply an application that opens an interactive TCP based session. telnet $SOME_HOST 25 is simply opening a TCP session on $SOME_HOST on the well-known port 25 (SMTP) and is an excellent way of seeing if the host is responding (is the smtp daemon listening?), seeing how it responds and possibly even sending e-mail. I commonly do this for a number of daemons including imap (143), http (80) and others. Of course a telnet server would generally use the well-known TCP port 23 but generally usage of this is discouraged since ssh is common and encrypted and telnet server is an unencrypted connection. Craig -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines