This is more a general UNIX question than NetBSD
specific, but one of the boxes is NetBSD, and maybe someone
here has a suggestion :

I have a client with an ancient SCO server running their
main business app (it's a database in postgres or something,
it's their whole business ...).

They had a couple of old dumb terminals hooked up to it via
serial lines, and some new PCs running PTERM or some other
telnet client on win32 that connect to it and they work - except
their last dumb term just died, so I figured I could hook up
a NetBSD box and make that emulate a dumb terminal (they don't
want to run win32 unless they have to).

To cut a long story short, the PC is running NetBSD 3.1 and
no X11, just a generic PC console.  I can (as you'd expect)
telnet from it to the SCO server and get a session running and
it mostly works, except that function keys don't seem to get
through, and screen fields in their application get filled out
with control chars etc when they type.  ie: there's something
wrong with the terminal emulation.  The PC's running win32 are
emulating 'sco-term' using a telnet client called PTerm and they work
just fine, but telnet (and rlogin, I thought maybe 8 bit was needed,
but telnet -8 did the same thing too) from the NetBSD box fails.

The app is running a text UI that looks like it's written in
curses or similar. If I didn't know better I'd have sworn it
was tn3270.

In the long distant past I solved a similar problem connecting
to an old PICK box (McDonnell-Douglas/AWA something running 'reality',
for the curious) by wrapping the login in a screen session, which
took care of a lot of key mapping etc, but I can't remember how I
did it.

Does anyone here have any suggestions for how to get the NetBSD
console on a PC to correctly work as a telnet client to this
old SCO server that doesn't seem to grok vt100 or pcvt?
Can I maybe set /etc/tty's for 'console' to be sco-term or
similar? or will that break the console?

thanks!

Carl