Telnetish 🚀

Simple C++ implementation of telnet server.

Contents:

• About
• Building
• Running
• Implementation
  • Directory structure
  • About

About

This project was coded for networking course at Warsaw University (Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics).
It's purpose was to design and implement simple telnet server serving basic menu with selectable options.

Building

To build the source please enter the following sequence of commands to your terminal:

$ cd <main_folder_of_telnetish>
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

The make command should generate telnet_server binary.

Running

The server usage looks like follows:

./telnet_server server <port> [flags]

Where there exist the following flags:

Switch	Description
--local Alias: -l	Run the server in local mode. In that mode server is not really a server but a local program that runs the implemented ncurses app in your terminal.
--nosplash	Disable initial splash screen animation
--nocolors Alias: -nc	Disable any ANSI color sequences
--verbose Alias: -v	Verbosive output mode

Implementation

Directory structure

telnetish
 |- include  (telnetish header files)
 |- src      (telnetish implemnetations of header files functions)
 \- server   (server entrypoint and ncurses application)

About

The implementation is a bit unusual.
The telnet server itself is implemented in server/server.cpp using include/telnet-server.h and include/stimple-telnet-server.h.

The basic idea is that the clients connects to the server synchronically (each client is served after the current one quits application, disconnects or is timed out).

The server (see include/term-program.h) forks itself and asynchronically runs ncurses applciation (see src/renderer.h).
The input and output is transferred from client to the forked process via pipes (and vice-versa).

It enables us to support any terminal type that is supported by ncurses and easilly implement console application via ncurses popular library.
Additionally the server can be started with --local switch to run as normal ncurses application without any network communication (useful when you want to locally test your application).