Homebrew Telnet

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I was both sad and excited to see that Apple removed telnet from Mac OS High Sierra, excited because telnet is a nearly 40 year old protocol that is highly insecure for network management and saddened because I often have to use telnet when at client sites.

Homebrew Telnet Install

Homebrew telnet install

Telnet is a computer protocol that was built for interacting with remote computers. The word 'Telnet' also refers to the command-line utility 'telnet', available under Windows OS and Unix-like systems, including Mac, Linux, and others. We will use the term 'Telnet' mostly in the context of the telnet. Tap for telnet In MacOS 10.13, the one included with homebrew will work, but will not build in 10.14 due to i386 being deprecated. At some point I'll change the name of this package to make it easier.

There are a few different methods you can use to bring back telnet, including copying over the binaries from a Sierra install to /usr/local/bin (as seen here) or using a session manager like SecureCRT, but since I’ve been using Homebrew to manage a few other packages for a while now I figured I’d just go ahead and use that.

  • First install Homebrew from your terminal (warning: please don’t copy and paste code snippets from a web browser straight into your terminal, please double check your sources)
  • Run

There you have it. Run telnet by simply issuing the telnet command and the ip/port you want to connect to.

I was both sad and excited to see that Apple removed telnet from Mac OS High Sierra, excited because telnet is a nearly 40 year old protocol that is highly insecure for network management and saddened because I often have to use telnet when at client sites.

There are a few different methods you can use to bring back telnet, including copying over the binaries from a Sierra install to /usr/local/bin (as seen here) or using a session manager like SecureCRT, but since I’ve been using Homebrew to manage a few other packages for a while now I figured I’d just go ahead and use that.

Homebrew Telnet

Homebrew Putty

Homebrew Telnet
  • First install Homebrew from your terminal (warning: please don’t copy and paste code snippets from a web browser straight into your terminal, please double check your sources)
  • Run

Homebrew Telnet Commands

There you have it. Run telnet by simply issuing the telnet command and the ip/port you want to connect to.