My First Problem with Vista
I've had Vista on a laptop for a couple months now, and a few weeks back I bought a desktop with Vista. So far I've been fairly happy with it... I don't understand a lot of the complaints that people have been making. Well a few weeks ago I needed to console into a Cisco switch. I've done this just a few times before, so I go about my business as I normally would -- Start -- Programs -- Accessories -- Communications -- Wait a second... No HyperTerminal. So I do some searching online and I find the answer. Vista doesn't ship with HyperTerm anymore. They suggest using the command line telnet for telnet connections, and completely forget about serial communication. So I had to go find a freeware option on the net. The option I found was Poderosa. Which supports telnet, ssh, local cygwin shell and serial communication.
Now, a week or so later, I wanted to telnet into a pop3 server (I wanted to test credentials) and I don't have netcat on this box yet. So I go to the command prompt and I type telnet. I'm rather surprised by the result:
C:\Users\Tyler>telnet
'telnet' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
I don't get it... The Microsoft help page told me to use command line telnet. I do a bit more searching and find this page. Telnet was removed as a default install option for Vista, you have to go into Programs and Features --> Turn Windows Features on or off and install it. So Vista ships without a single telnet client installed, while previous versions shipped with two and that's it... that's my first beef with Vista.
Catching up on your posts! Another crazy post! No telnet? I wonder what the motivation was for that decision. It’s not like they are trying to strip down the OS; Vista is still as bloated as anything. Weird, weird, weird….
I don’t personally use Vista, and every week it becomes less and less of a need (or even a want) in our corporate environment. I likely will end up getting on the bandwagon at home. I’ve been around long enough to know that it just doesn’t pay to stick to the past, but I doubt I’ll go Vista until I build a machine for Starcraft 2.
Well, I have just found that my favourite SSH client PuTTy now supports serial in version 0.60. So now I have telnet, SSH and serial in one product. That should be all that you need.
Curunir
I can not believe that Microsoft has done this!
This makes no sense to anyone with sense.
Most people that use telnet regularly probably have a telnet application installed anyway, but the power of having this always as a command line in windows is very powerful for a troubleshooting situation, most time with helping someone else test that they are getting to a certain port on a server etc you tend to use telnet to do this.
It helps that it is already there, and that you don’t have to walk a user though installing a telnet application first.
I don’t even do tech support like I used to, and don’t have to use this as much, but still everyone once in awhile while helping a friend etc this will be a issue.
MS must have no sense at all to do this, even removing Hyperterm, that I use tons of, because I work on routers and switches with console connections most the time, makes no real sense to me, I am really starting to hate Vista for more reasons every day as well.
@Jeff,
I’d say that I use telnet fairly often and I’ve never used anything more than the Windows telnet client. I guess there could be malicious uses for it, and it’s something that the average user probably doesn’t need.
As for Hyperterm, I think that may have been a licensing issue… after all, Microsoft doesn’t own HyperTerm.
I have been needing telnet for a while. I don’t get why Vista doesn’t have it