The other day, I was researching hacking my wireless router. After I began, it became clear that I needed to telnet into it (as it appeared that I had bricked the thing). I opened up a command prompt and typed “telnet”, only to receive an error that “‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file”. After some research, I found out that by default, telnet isn’t enabled in Vista. As to why this is the case, I’m not quite sure as the binaries for telnet can’t possible take up more than a few hundred KB. Enabling telnet is simply a matter of going into Vista’s “Programs and Features” within the control panel and checking a box.
To enable telnet and other disabled features in Vista:
- Open the “Start” menu and select the control panel
- Click “Programs and Features”
- On the left side of the window, choose “Turn Windows features on or off”
- Scroll down in the list until you find “Telnet Client” and place a check in the box (I would also recommend installing the TFTP client as well)
- Click Ok and close the window.
It’s also important to note that this is the same process to enable IIS (Internet Information Services) applications, such as the FTP and Web servers.
That’s all! Thanks, and happy computing!
