Subject: Re: telnet problem
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
List: current-users
Date: 06/30/1998 01:27:04
>There is a word that needs to be spoken that explains this:
>
>	ISO-8859-1
>
>TELNET doesn't know from character sets beyond the original NETASCII. I
>don't know if there is a TELNET option for specifying character set, but
>it's something we should explicitly support, instead of "just send 8 bits."

Um, maybe I'm being dumb ... but I think even if we did know about
a hypothetical ISO-8859-1 character set, this wouldn't have helped
Bill, because his Mac telnet client thought that all _other_
character sets were the same as NVT ASCII, and needed a NUL after
the CR.

Actually ... RFC 2066 documents a way of negotiating character sets
(you learn something new every day, I guess).  However .... I think
that this is orthogonal to Bill's problem.  I don't think the
character set _specifies_ things like CR, LF, FF (maybe it does,
and I'm being dumb), and _that_ was Bill's real problem.  His
Mac client said, "Yeah, I can do BINARY", and BINARY is defined
as "Don't do any processing of my data".

However, you're wrong about Telnet not knowing about other character
sets ... EBCDIC is mentioned quite clearly in the Telnet RFCs :-)

--Ken