koziol@yoyodyne.ncsa.uiuc.edu (07/30/90)
This is a posting for the beta 9 release of NCSA Telnet 2.3 for the PC, posted Monday July 30. The update for this release is enclosed below. Quincey Koziol Programmer NCSA Please report bugs to 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 BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b8: 1) No change in the internal ethernet drivers. The Appletalk is still under some work, but the ni9210 may be put on indefinite hold. 2) The previously reported 'bug' about Telnet corrupting the environment when you are shelled out is a bug in the Microsoft compiler. There is presently nothing we can do to fix this problem. Possibly when we get our copy of Microsoft C 6.0 the problem will go away, but don't hold your breath. 3) The scrollback has been speeded up and now also restores the screen correctly when exitting. The cursor is now replaced correctly when you exit. There are several new things about the scrollback buffer which are documented here. The key sequence "home-home" will place the cursor at the upper left corner of the present screen, and the key sequence "end-end" will place the cursor at the lower right corner of the current screen. Pressing "home" or "end" will take you to the beginning or end of the current line respectively. "Pgup" and "Pgdn" move you an entire screen up or down in the buffer, but don't move the cursor position. The behavior of the scrollback buffer when the cursor is on the top or bottom line and the up or down arrow (respectively) is pressed is now determined by the "autoscroll=[no|yes]" configuration variable. If autoscroll is yes (the default state), then the screen will continue to scroll in a direction until the opposite key is pressed (i.e. the down arrow, when scrolling up). If autoscrolling is off, then the buffer will only scroll one line up further into the buffer. 4) Telnet now reports back negotiation information to the console window about the option negotiation which is being processed with the telnet server you are connected to. This allows you to see exactly what telnet options are enabled and what the server would like Telnet to support. 5) The alt-B key now moves you a session back in the list of sessions you have open. ( A source of great relief to me at least...) 6) A small vt100 bug was cleaned up which dealt with the "^[c" sequence eating the next vt100 sequence which followed. 7) F11 & F12 are available as macro keys again (due to overwhelming response). 8) The keyboard mapping was eating the Print Screen key, but now it passes it correctly, and prints out the text on the screen. 9) A new configuration option was added to allow sessions which are closed to disappear without needing an additional keypress was added. This option is "windowgoaway=[no|yes]" in the configuration file. The default state is set to not make windows go away. 10) The following list of ftp commands was added to Telnet's ftp server: CDUP - allows the ftp connection to change to the parent directory MKD - allows the ftp connection to create a directory on the machine running Telnet RMD - allows the ftp connection to remove a directory on the machine running Telnet DELE - allows the ftp connection to delete a file on the machine running Telnet These last two commands violate the security of the machine running Telnet, so we highly recommend that you create a password file for Telnet and use it all the time. Without a password file, anyone can ftp to your machine and wipe you out! 11) Linemode and Negotiate About Window Size (NAWS) options are added to the telnet options that Telnet supports. 12) The ctrl-C is fixed for certain now! I patched the ctrl-C interupt directly. The previous problems were caused by the Microsoft C compiler doing odd things with the interupt signal. 13) Support for more function keys was added to the vt100 key support. This is a non-standard addition, but several people asked for it. The function keys F5 thru F10 now extended the F1-F4 vt100 sequences: F1 - ESC[P F2 - ESC[Q F3 - ESC[R F4 - ESC[S F5 - ESC[T F6 - ESC[U F7 - ESC[V F8 - ESC[W F9 - ESC[X F10- ESC[Y 14) Two additional options were added to the configuration file: cursorstart=[0-9] cursorend=[0-9] These two options allow you to choose what line the cursor starts on and ends on. These two options take a number, which is the number of lines from the top of the character block to begin and end. The default is to have an underline cursor in 24 line mode, and a block cursor in 43 & 50 line mode. 15) Support for the AT&T Starlan 10 ethernet board was added as an internal driver. Thanks for Larry Hicks at Bradley University for the effort in writing it. There is an example of the use in the config.tel supplied with this package. 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) LPR is crashing with a variety of errors. 5) FTPBIN is slow, and doesn't handle disk full problems well yet. 6) Domain look ups for long machine names have some problems. (How long you say?, I don't know, I am still trying to get a grip on it). 7) 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. 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. 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 BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b7: 1) No change in the internal ethernet drivers. The Appletalk is still under some work, but the ni9210 may be put on indefinite hold. 2) The cursor changing from an underscore into a larger underscore on monochrome monitors is rectified. 3) Ctrl-C will no longer break out of Telnet. 4) Added -r command line switch to turn output redirection off in ftpbin.exe. 5) Fixed various problems making "mget *" in ftpbin.exe do bad things to memory and crash. 6) When shelling to DOS from Telnet, the COMSPEC= environment variable is now checked to see what shell to spawn. 7) Undefined macro keys (shift f1-f10) no longer print wierd strings. 8) Hercules graphics mode fixed, now supports Tektronix mode again. 9) Patched ftpbin.exe so that the last character in a file (ctrl-Z) is not omitted during binary file transfers. 10) Added function prototypes and #ifdef's to avoid header file re-inclusion to source. 11) A couple of vt100 emulation bugs which only manifested themselves when connected to a VMS machine have been patched, please check these out and let us know if they are correct. 12) A bunch of bugs were found in various sections of the code which we believe have eliminated the 'assignment to null pointer' run-time error when exitting Telnet. If you experience this error please make certain to report a bug and let us know about it. 13) SOURCE RELEASE!!! This is still a beta set of source. It has been cleaned up well enough that it only generates a couple of "formal parameter not used" warnings, but there is still some work which needs to get done. 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). 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) When shelled out to DOS from Telnet, the environment is corrupted somehow, but this is at the trailing end of the environment and doesn't cause crashes (I think). Things Which Still Need To Be Crammed In: 1) Telnet line mode support. 2) A few configuration options to allow users to change the cursor they use in Telnet. Please keep the bug reports coming in! telbug@ncsa.uiuc.edu NCSA Telnet 2.3b6 1) Drivers update The following is an update on the status of the internal Telnet drivers. For the PC Bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- atalk *Apple Talk No packet *Packet Driver Yes 3c501 3COM 3C501 Yes 3c503 *3COM 3C503 Yes pcnic Ungermann-Bass PC-NIC Yes wd8003e Western Digital WD8003E Yes wd8003eb Western Digital WD8003EB Yes ni5210 MICOM NI5210 Yes For PS/2 MCA bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- nicps/2 Ungermann-Bass NICps/2 Yes 3c523 3COM 3C523 Yes wd8003a Western Digital WD8003EA Yes ni9210 *MICOM NI9210 No The ??? indicate boards that are buggy. Please test them out and report back to us. 2) ftp shell escape fixed 3) ftp -h parameter correctly reconized 4) EGA tek emulator fixed 5) VGA tek support added BIG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b5 1) 3c523 Driver fixed. 2) Additional keystrokes added to Scroll Lock mode Home -> Beginning of Line End -> End of Line Cntl+PGUP -> Top of Scrollback buffer Cntl+PGCN -> Bottom of Scrollback buffer 3) External TCP/IP Utilities The following utilities now work with the new drivers and keyboard mapper. If NCSA Telnet works these should also work. ftpbin.exe -> ftp client & server minitel.exe -> a very simple telnet program Network Printing Utilites contributed by Paul Hilchey. lpr.exe, lpq.exe, lprm.exe. 4) 3c503 driver fixed. The 3c503 board does not allow the software to determine whether thin or thick Ethernet is being used. Therefore, telnet needs to be told what type of wire is being used. A new config.tel keyword "wire" has been added. Its usage is shown below. wire=thin ; this is the default. Telnet will use thin Ether wire=thick ; Telnet will use thick Ether 5) Keyboard Mapper bug fixes. CAPS LOCK no longer blocks control and ALT characters. NUM LOCK now maps the keypad correctly. 6) Keyboard Mapper addition. The keyboard mapper now addresses all the keys on the 101 key (extended) keyboard. There is an extra map which has been added to the already existing five keyboard maps (NORMAL, LEFT SHIFT, RIGHT SHIFT, ALT, and CONTROL). The extra map is for the extended keys, these keys are only generated by the extended keyboard. The extra map consists of 89 pairs of integers (one for each key), and is in the same order as the other maps (see the README file for details). The order of the maps is now : NORMAL, LEFT SHIFT, RIGHT SHIFT, ALT, CONTROL, and EXTENDED. 7) ftp excepts full pathnames for changing directories. It requires that you type a double backslash for each single backslash in the path name however, i.e. "c:\\dos" for "c:\dos". You may use a forward slash '/' for the backslashes in MS-DOS path names also, i.e. "c:/dos" for "c:\dos". 8) Ungerman Bass PC/NIC driver is fixed. 9) Western Digital 8003A Microchannel Card fixed. 10) Drivers update The following is an update on the status of the internal Telnet drivers. For the PC Bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- atalk *Apple Talk ??? packet *Packet Driver Yes 3c501 3COM 3C501 Yes 3c503 *3COM 3C503 Yes pcnic Ungermann-Bass PC-NIC Yes wd8003e Western Digital WD8003E Yes wd8003eb Western Digital WD8003EB Yes ni5210 MICOM NI5210 Yes For PS/2 MCA bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- nicps/2 Ungermann-Bass NICps/2 Yes 3c523 3COM 3C523 Yes wd8003a Western Digital WD8003EA Yes ni9210 *MICOM NI9210 No The ??? indicate boards that are buggy. Please test them out and report back to us. BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b4: 1) Drivers update The following is an update on the status of the internal Telnet drivers. For the PC Bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- atalk *Apple Talk ??? packet *Packet Driver Yes 3c501 3COM 3C501 Yes 3c503 *3COM 3C503 ??? pcnic Ungermann-Bass PC-NIC No wd8003e Western Digital WD8003E Yes wd8003eb Western Digital WD8003EB Yes ni5210 MICOM NI5210 Yes For PS/2 MCA bus, Name Board Works?? ------------------------------------------------------------- nicps/2 Ungermann-Bass NICps/2 Yes 3c523 3COM 3C523 ??? wd8003a Western Digital WD8003EA No ni9210 *MICOM NI9210 No The ??? indicate boards that are buggy. Please test them out and report back to us. 2) Terminal type negotiation. Telnet can now send its terminal type a host. The default terminal type is "dec-vt100." It can be changed with the termtype option in the config.tel file, e.g. termtype="vt100" will cause telnet to send the string "vt100" instead of "dec-vt100" to a host. 3) Telnet to "other port" works with Domain lookup Previously, attempting to connect to a port on a machine requiring a domain lookup resulted in a connection to the Telnet port and not the specified port. Now the sucessful lookup will result in the connection to the specified port. BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b3: 1) Alt-E escape to DOS no longer results in stack overflow. 2) Addition of macros for shift-function key combination (Shift-f1 through Shift-f12) The shift-function key combinations can now be mapped to user-defined strings. Twelve new keywords have been added to config.tel, one for each function key (f1,f2,f3,....,f12). To assign a macro string to a function key: <key>=<string> where <key> is one of the new keywords and <string> contains your macro. The following key sequences are used to generate special characters in your macro. They follow the same style as the C programming language and may seem strange if you are not familiar with C. Desired Character Definition ----------------- ---------- Backslash (\) \\ TAB \t CR LF \n or \r Space \032 Number of text rows \# Internet number of PC \i The \xxx string, where xxx is a number between 0-255, will send that character to the the host, e.g. the Space key above. If your macro string contains spaces, then the string either has to be encased in quotes or the space should be coded as a special character. e.g. f1="ftp \i\n" and f1=ftp\032\i\n are functionally identical. BUG FIXES FOR NCSA Telnet 2.3b2: 1) Appletalk driver better (may not be quite right yet, but it is now at least compiled into the executable correctly). 2) Client mode fixed from Microsoft C 5.1 port. Now works correctly in binary mode.