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tostitoday at 10:50 AM1 replyview on HN

Telnet was among my debugging tools for web applications.

And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!


Replies

chasd00today at 6:16 PM

I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.