[ history security download ]

In the summer of 1996 I took over responsibility for the Linux NetKit package. This is the package that consists of such little-used and insignificant programs as telnet and finger.

Installing these things had always been a chancy business, all the way back to the days when there was NET1 and NET2 and you were lucky to get binaries that ran, much less source that would compile. Florian LaRoche’s NetKit packages did a good job of reigning in that chaos. Finally there was one single authoritative source for most of the programs and there was a known place one could go and pick them up.

Unfortunately getting NetKits to compile was a bit of a chore, and Florian himself disappeared off the net for a while, so by June of 1996 there hadn’t been any updates in a good while and various changes to the kernel and libc made the existing NetKit versions excessively hard to work with. More importantly, there was at least one outstanding security problem.

There had been a bunch of NetKits, but only NetKit-A and NetKit-B had wide distribution. NetKit-A was almost entirely just repackaging of things maintained by other people, while NetKit-B contained a pile of modified BSD code that had been maintained by Florian. Since most of the contents of NetKit-A had been updated separately since NetKit-A was last released, I simply killed off NetKit-A, and continued with just NetKit-B. ” (http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/old-netkit.html)