7 ms·
A list of fun destinations for telnet
- n0um3n4 9mo agouff I hope i can list my MUD game (still in dev, though)
- conesus 9mo agoSay more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.
- User23 9mo agoSillyMUD branches will always have a special place in my heart. Who doesn’t love leveling up in Sesame Street?!
- m-hodges 9mo agoOh man RIP towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
- kidbomb 9mo agoAnyone knows what happened with it? Maybe the creator would like to pass the torch?
- sigio 9mo agoIts still running just fine
- huhtenberg 9mo agoConnecting to it times out for me. traceroute: ... 15 213.136.2.6 35.049 ms 34.440 ms 34.338 ms 16 213.136.2.20 34.814 ms 33.359 ms 35.116 ms 17 213.154.229.42 33.837 ms 33.572 ms 34.794 ms 18 213.136.8.188 30.174 ms 28.810 ms 33.674 ms tcptraceroute ... 23 : ... 15 213.136.2.6 28.626 ms 28.657 ms 28.849 ms 16 213.136.2.20 28.608 ms 28.483 ms 28.515 ms 17 213.154.229.42 27.989 ms 28.058 ms 29.336 ms 18 * * *
- sigio 9mo agoAh, it must be ipv6 only now then: My traceroute [v0.95] t14 (2a0e:5700:xxxx) -> towel.blinkenl2026-01-27T13:33:52+0100 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 2a0e:5700:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 0.8 0.9 0.8 1.2 0.2 2. 2a02:f640:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 8.5 9.3 8.4 11.0 1.2 3. 2a02:f640::1 0.0% 4 8.2 8.8 8.2 9.2 0.5 4. amsix-501.xe-0-0-0.jun1.bit-1.ne 0.0% 4 12.9 13.1 11.7 15.3 1.6 5. e48.leaf-sw2.bit-1.network.bit.n 0.0% 4 10.7 11.2 10.7 11.8 0.5 6. lo0.leaf-sw3.bit-2b.network.bit. 0.0% 4 11.8 12.0 11.8 12.3 0.3 7. 2001:7b8::213:136:2:43 0.0% 4 12.8 12.0 11.2 12.8 0.7 8. deepthought.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 4 12.4 11.8 11.4 12.4 0.4 9. towel.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 3 11.6 11.8 11.5 12.2 0.4 ..... @@@@@ @@@@@ ........... ...... @ @ @ @ .......... ....... @@@ @ @ ......... ........ @@ @ @ ........ ........ @@@@@@@ @@@@@ th ....... ....... ----------------------- ...... ...... C E N T U R Y ..... ..... ----------------------- .... ... @@@@@ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ ... == @ @ @ @ @ == __||__ @ @@@@ @ @ __||__ | | @ @ @ @ @ | | _________|______|_____ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ _____|______|_________ ```
- coatmatter 9mo agoalternative: telehack.com
- huhtenberg 9mo agoThis is wonderful. Thank you.
- augusteo 9mo agoThe Star Wars ASCII animation was how I learned telnet existed. Felt like discovering a secret passage in the internet. There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.
- nomel 9mo agoWanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO! I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!
- tosti 9mo agoTelnet was among my debugging tools for web applications. And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!
- chasd00 9mo agoI vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.
- JamesTRexx 9mo agoI think I was the only one in the operations team who knew how to use telnet to check connections and existence of adresses on company and outside email servers. As well as other low level tools to diagnose problems with Windows PCs and servers. There just weren't any gui tools like that.
- 9mo ago
- shorden 9mo agonethack.alt.org is conspicuously absent...
- anthk 9mo agoAnd Slashem (his expanded sibling) and the server for Dungeon Crawl (for people which prefer action over exploration).
- tux3 9mo agoIt supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days. That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.
- sgt 9mo agoThis is insane > doom.w-graj.net 666 > Play Doom in the terminal (code and details)
- mwest 9mo agoVery cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list! Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
- cerebrum01 9mo agotry .com
- mwest 9mo agoThat doesn't work either? Looks like the .com and .net domains are sadly just up for sale rather than being used for something fun.
- _ache_ 9mo agoRelated to the last Telnet CVE? Why talking about telnet now otherwise?
- btheconqueror 9mo agohaha, I was just going to say the same thing
- tech-no-logical 9mo agofor years I had this in my .muttrc. it's been commented out since it stopped working... #set signature="cat ~/.signature && telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666 | tail -n3|"
- macintux 9mo agoPer this thread it may be IPv6 only now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775926
- cl3misch 9mo agoI was wondering why the Starwars one is not at the top of the list. Then I saw it no longer exists :-(
- sigio 9mo agoIt still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it). It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)
- w4yai 9mo agoDoesn't work for me
- cl3misch 9mo agoThanks! Admittedly I didn't check before writing my comment. It does indeed still work! Maybe one has to enable ipv6.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoIt worked last time i tried it, but it's not working for me today
- crowfunder 9mo agoWasted opportunity for a telnet.net or tel.net domain.
- moritonal 9mo agoIf you want a rabbit hole, this is the likely owner of both tel.net and sms.net = https://www.gbnet.net/ https://www.gbnet.net/
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoAlso teln.et (Ethiopia)
- ale42 9mo agoThis makes me think of the historical hxxp://simtel.net/ domain (now web spam, whence the hxxp), see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.net/about.php https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.... The first time seeing it I was always thinking to something like "simulated telnet"...
- phplovesong 9mo agoI can forsee a future when all the AI slop, popups, fake news, propaganda and ads have fully consumed the web. Maybe then we just go back to an oldschool text based way of communicating. No google. No socials. Just text.
- Bender 9mo agoThat should be Gopher for websites but advertisers would find it should it become popular. Text chat via IRCD. Advertisers get banned on IRC.
- akuchling 9mo agoOr its modern incarnation, Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- VMG 9mo agoDo you believe that it is impossible to advertise, spread fake news or propaganda via text? Do you know what the letters in LLM mean?
- phplovesong 9mo agoTell me where the slop is distrubuted on? Its 99% Social media, fake news sites, propaganda like fox or any russian "news site" or some combo of the above. If we dont have any of the above the propaganda or AI slop is just not worth it. This is why having small focused MODERATED communities is the only viable future.
- jayknight 9mo agoWe'll all just be fingering each other.
- Vaslo 9mo agoCan’t tell if this is a sexual comment or a comment on people tattling on each other but thought provoking either way
- tgv 9mo ago~/work/...> telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl zsh: command not found: telnet
- MonkeyClub 9mo agoMay be a case of PEBKAC.
- Bender 9mo agoSearch your OS repositories for something like inetutils-telnet.
- tgv 9mo agoI know. It's just that out-of-the-box, telnet isn't even installed anymore.
- Bender 9mo agotelnet isn't even installed anymore. This is expected. Telnet is not encrypted and people are discouraged from using the client or the inetd daemon. It is assumed that if someone installs it manually it is more likely they have a reason to do so and hopefully understand the risks. It will always exist in repositories as there are still a myriad of enterprise appliances that use telnet for management and likely will be the case for the foreseeable future.
- fragmede 9mo agonetcat is though
- chasd00 9mo agoi bet this is something an ai could help with. "write a simple telnet client in python. It only needs to connect to the host and display what the host sends. conform to any connection initialization requirements per rfc 854". That would probably get you close. /edit front page of google did this and it worked for me. Need to do a pip install telnetlib3 import telnetlib3 import sys def simple_telnet_client(host, port=23): """ Connects to a telnet server and prints incoming data. Compliant with RFC 854 (via telnetlib handling of NVTs). """ try: # Initialize connection print(f"Connecting to {host}:{port}...") tn = telnetlib3.Telnet(host, port) # Read and display output indefinitely until connection closes while True: # read_eager() reads data already available without blocking data = tn.read_eager() if data: sys.stdout.write(data.decode('ascii', errors='ignore')) sys.stdout.flush() # Check if socket is closed if tn.get_socket() is None: break except ConnectionRefusedError: print("Connection refused.") except Exception as e: print(f"An error occurred: {e}") finally: if 'tn' in locals(): tn.close() print("\nConnection closed.") if __name__ == "__main__": # Example usage: # simple_telnet_client("telehack.com", 23) # Replace with desired host host = input("Enter host: ") simple_telnet_client(host)
- VMG 9mo agoNote that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. ANSI escape sequences can seriously mess with your system, RCE included.
- kjs3 9mo agoNote that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. Are you being hyperbolic or do you seriously think the attack surface area of ANSI escape sequences is 'much more' than, say, Javascrpt?
- ifh-hn 9mo agoJavaScript has to escape the browser sandbox, does telnet have a similar sandbox? Or can it access the system directly? I don't know the answer but if telnet can directly access the system that seems more dangerous irrespective of the attack surface.
- VMG 9mo agoTelnet is "sandboxed" in that it can only output characters to your tty, however that in itself is quite a powerful primitive. The ANSI control characters wield power of a huge stack of not very robust code https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-56803 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-56803
- kjs3 9mo agoThat's a very fair point, but on my system telnet is 211144 bytes. How big is a javascript runtime + browser + browser sandbox. I have no idea, but I'd be really surprised if it was less than 3 orders of magnitude bigger, and not at all surprised if it was 4 orders of magnitude bigger. There's just more places for things to go wrong. And, telnet isn't installed by default on many systems. So...YMMV.
- hei-lima 9mo agoFor those of you curious about what the Star Wars one looked like, the tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
- cerebrum01 9mo agojust type `starwars` from telehack
- pards 9mo agoMy first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me. The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
- Bender 9mo agoThe first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
- api 9mo agoIf you run stuff like ZeroTier or Tailscale or any other encrypted mesh or VPN you can just run telnetd and happily remote access with plain text. Not that it buys you anything other than being retro. :)
- simmons 9mo agoWow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1] [1] http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt
- xeyownt 9mo agoFor telnet.wiki.gd, there is a captcha: Captcha: Repeat the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times. All my answers failed. I guess I must be a computer.
- xeyownt 9mo agoTried: - Venera - Venera 7 - the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times. - the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times - the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet - Rosetta ... Okay found it: Venera Venera Venera
- fer 9mo agovenera venera venera
- orthoxerox 9mo ago> - the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet The Wi-Fi password is "four words all uppercase, one word all lowercase".
- homeonthemtn 9mo agoAny one got a good MUD to recommend?
- MiscIdeaMaker99 9mo agoBatMUD is the one I played a long time ago, and has been around for 35 years now. I honestly don't know how active it is these days. https://www.bat.org https://www.bat.org
- tenthirtyam 9mo agoI just checked and ancient.anguish.org is still online. Port 2222.
- fragmede 9mo agothis is ssh, but funky.nondterministic.computer is one
- fragmede 9mo agossh doesn't support virtual hosts, otherwise I'd try some other stuff. There's just something to be said for running on the default port.
- LightBug1 9mo agoSurfers!
- jamal-kumar 9mo agoMy favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise... People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
- mcculley 9mo agoHow was a noise other than ASCII BEL sent over telnet?
- kmstout 9mo ago"I Ping, Therefore I Am": https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/ https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/
- mmmlinux 9mo agoWow, that scrolling banner...
- garaetjjte 9mo agoI did Pong, Breakout and Tetris few years ago: telnet milek7.pl
- degrees57 9mo agoThank you! This was fun.
- moonlion_eth 9mo agoI made a roguelike telnet server telnet hetz.latha.org 2323
- drtournier 9mo ago$> telnet tsunami.thebigwave.net The one and only. Still online to my surprise.
- yaky 9mo ago> Rainmaker was pretty great, and it lasted at least as far as 2018. I don’t recall what happened to it. WeatherUnderground shut its API down in 2018.
- jfalcon 9mo agoBack in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials. https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/INTERNET/dial_5 https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/INTERN... Too bad mobile killed the dialtone.
- dataf3l 9mo agotry pub400.com
- nhggfu 9mo agotelnet to port 25 to send fake emails <- glory days.
- Bondi_Blue 9mo agoOthers: (where netcat is suggested) https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services?tab=readme-ov-file#Entertainment-and-games https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services?tab=readm...
- cmcollier 9mo agoAh, so this is why I suddenly got a bunch of email. Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site. Here's some site meta-history too: https://telnet.org/history/ https://telnet.org/history/
- antisol 9mo agoCool site! I especially like the list of RFCs. Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)
- aprilnya 9mo agotowel.blinkenlights.nl seems to still work for me?