hhp00389@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (08/27/90)
This note is to announce the availibility of NCSA Telnet for the PC 2.3b10 on our ftp server, zaphod.ncsa.uiuc.edu (128.174.20.50). This new version has many enhancements and many bug fixes which were reported to me from all over the net, thanks to all of you. Quincey Koziol Programmer NCSA As usual please report bugs to: telbug@ncsa.uiuc.edu Below is a copy of the update for this beta version: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b10: 1) Fixed LPR not to send a null length file when the file doesn't exist. 2) Grabbed another couple of interrupts to get the ctrl-c trapping better. This should finally take care of the problem. 3) LPR now reads files from other drives correctly. 4) LPQ & LPRM now look for CONFIG.TEL environment variable, instead of CONFIGTEL environment variable in order to be compatible with the rest of the applications. 5) The packet driver interface now passes RARP packets. I am not totally certain if it will pass a BOOTP packet or not. 6) A BRAND SPANKING NEW keyboard mapping interface. This facility should be totally compatible with MS-Kermit keyboard mapping files. The only thing we don't support are some of the kermit verbs to map to keys. Please read the keymap.txt file for detailed information. 7) Moved a bunch of #includes around in the source to make porting to other compilers easier. 8) Added a sane memory error trapping function. If telnet suddenly spits a message at you about a memory problem and says that it has written a telnet.err file, _PLEASE_ mail it back to us so we can fix the bug which caused it. (For those of you who are interested in nice memory debugging code, take a look at the memdebug.c file, it contains some really slick replacements for dynamic memory allocation which I scarfed from a recent Dr. Dobbs article and enhanced.) 9) Added the Alt+W command to send your password when ftp'ing back to your own machine while in telnet. Just press Alt+W at the Password: prompt and hit enter, your password from the telnet password file will be sent back to your machine. 10) Patched the existing code some to enable the BOOTP support. To use this method of recieving your IP number, just include the myip=BOOTP setting in your config.tel file. 11) LPR was patched to print the burst page. 12) The color support has been enhanced to allow high intensity foreground text and blinking backgrounds. To use this, just set whatever color, nfcolor for example, to a color in capitals. For example, nfcolor=CYAN would set the normal text's foreground color to bright cyan. 13) Because of the new keyboard mapping interface, the shifted function key macros and the keyboard= entries in the config.tel were removed. Just use the new keyboard mapping interface, its a lot better. NOTE: For Microsoft Windows users out there, don't run Telnet in the background, packets get dropped or written to other applications causing crashes. Run Telnet in exclusive mode, and turn on bios screen usage (bios=yes). We have also had conflicting reports of Telnet working well with Windows, so at least try to take care. Known Bugs: 1) Tektronix GIN mode is not fixed yet. (Sorry, but it will be one of the first things I work on, I promise!) 2) FTPBIN is slow, and doesn't handle disk full problems well yet. 3) The dreaded NULL pointer error on exitting Telnet is still around. This may not get fixed until we get the new version of Codeview, because Telnet is too large to debug normally. 4) Pasting from the copy buffer into a session is not printed when in line mode. 5) Mouse may move backwards in the scrollback for certain mice. Things Which Still Need To Be Crammed In: 1) All the bugs above. 2) Appletalk driver will get fixed. 3) Various people have asked for more screen drivers, so perhaps if a lot of people ask for different screen drivers for tektronix plots, we will add another screen driver or two. 4) Overlaying the code so that Telnet will take up less memory. 5) Maybe update the telpass interface. Please keep the bug reports coming in! telbug@ncsa.uiuc.edu BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b9: 1) A patch was made to make the NIC PS/2 card work correctly. 2) The problems with the LPR utilities not having enough stack space has been fixed. 3) The problem with domain name serving which was introduced in b8 has been fixed. 4) Added an option to the config.tel file to determine whether the clock should be on or off. The default is on ex. - clock=off 5) Fixed several problems introduced in b8 having to do with the vt100 emulation. This caused various problems using EDT on Vaxes. 6) Fixed bug which did not reset the line wrapping mode when Alt-R was pressed to reset vt100 emulation. NOTE: For Microsoft Windows users out there, don't run Telnet in the background, packets get dropped or written to other applications causing crashes. Run Telnet in exclusive mode, and remember to turn off keyboard re-mapping in your config.tel (keyboard=off), and turn on bios screen usage (bios=yes). We have also had conflicting reports of Telnet working well with Windows, so at least try to take care. Known Bugs: 1) Tektronix GIN mode is not fixed yet. 2) The keyboard mapper still has a cruddy file interface, this will get improved in the next couple of weeks. 3) The keyboard gets reset to a US keyboard from the users keyboard type. 4) FTPBIN is slow, and doesn't handle disk full problems well yet. 5) The dreaded NULL pointer error on exitting Telnet is still around. This may not get fixed until we get the new version of Codeview, because Telnet is too large to debug normally. 6) Macros and pasting the copy buffer are not printed when in line mode. 7) LPR sends a null length entry when a file doesn't exist. 8) Mouse may move backwards in the scrollback for certain mice. 9) LPR does not find files on other drives. 10) LPR may not be reading the command line for the -h option correctly. Things Which Still Need To Be Crammed In: 1) All the bugs above. 2) Definiteley re-write the keybaord mapping to handle arbitrary length strings for any key on the keyboard. 3) Appletalk driver will get fixed. 4) Various people have asked for more screen drivers, so perhaps if a lot of people ask for different screen drivers for tektronix plots, we will add another screen driver or two. 5) Overlaying the code so that Telnet will take up less memory. 6) Maybe update the telpass interface. This week, one of the developers for Telnet, Heeren Pathak, graduated from the university and left NCSA to work at Mitre. I would like to thank Heeren for all his effort and time he has devoted to this piece of software, and for everyone to wish him well in his new endeavours. Please keep the bug reports coming in! telbug@ncsa.uiuc.edu