telnet/aixterm weirdness

[Jim Hudgens]

A user here reported something which is very strange.  If you are
running under an aixterm window, and start telnet to a Cray
running UNICOS, the window becomes *very* garbled.  The foreground
color changes, and the terminal settings inside the window
are indeed strange (but not easily describable). It does not 
do this with any other host I could find.  

I think what is happening, is that when TERM=aixterm, 
telnet, in its option negotiation with the cray, gets kicked into
some weird state.  (I think the RS6000 kicks into tn3270
mode but I am not sure how to test this theory.)  If TERM=xterm,
then all is well.  I found by experimentation, that once connected
to the cray (with TERM=aixterm), to escape back to the local 
telnet, type "emulate none", and all is well.  So something 
unusual happens when remote-host-type=cray and TERM=aixterm.
Note the last line below, says "Emulating a vt100 terminal".
Truely bizarre.  Replacing telnet with the one from uunet fixes this
nicely.  

  Here's what I found running under emacs in an 
aixterm window:

---------
csh> setenv TERM xterm
csh> telnet crayhost
Escape character is '^T'.

Cray UNICOS 

telnet> display
will flush output when sending interrupt characters.
won't send interrupt characters in urgent mode.
won't map carriage return on output.
will recognize certain control characters.
won't turn on socket level debugging.
won't print hexadecimal representation of network traffic.
won't show option processing.

[^E]	echo.
[^T]	escape.
[off]	erase.
[^O]	flushoutput.
[off]	interrupt.
[off]	kill.
[off]	quit.
[^D]	eof.
[off]	sak.
Not emulating (native type xterm)


---------


csh> setenv TERM aixterm
csh> telnet crayhost
^[[H^[[J^[[0;10m  

[[[  tons and tons of this stuff, escapes converted to the ^[ sequence
     by hand for posting ]]]

telnet> display
will flush output when sending interrupt characters.
won't send interrupt characters in urgent mode.
won't map carriage return on output.
will recognize certain control characters.
won't turn on socket level debugging.
won't print hexadecimal representation of network traffic.
won't show option processing.

[^E]	echo.
[^T]	escape.
[off]	erase.
[^O]	flushoutput.
[off]	interrupt.
[off]	kill.
[off]	quit.
[^D]	eof.
[off]	sak.
Emulating a vt100 terminal

-------------------

--
Disclaimer:  I didn't do it.
Jim Hudgens		Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
hudgens at sun13.scri.fsu.edu