I wanted to set up a 'nyancat' telnet server, but couldn't find any clear or obvious instructions on how to do so... so I came up with these steps.
Feel free to telnet to jonmoore.duckdns.org on port 23!
This was all inspired first by a tweet from @climagic, but the server mentioned in this tweet has been shut down by the owner "Due to bandwidth limitations", which made me kinda sad. You can quickly and easily run nyancat itself on your own terminal , but it circumvents that internet telnet connection to a remote server, and not nearly quite so fun. It also makes for a useful connectivity test for port 23.
There does seem to be a number of servers out there hosting this service,
- Start with Debian-based Linux installation of your choice.
- I would suggest running
apt update && apt upgrade, but I'll leave that to your choice. - Install BSD's inetd and nyancat:
apt install openbsd-inetd nyancat
- Edit the inetd config file:
sudo nano /etc/inetd.conf
- Add the following line:
telnet stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/nyancat nyancat -t
- Restart the inetd process:
/etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart
- And you're done!
Now, I also know that there's a nyancat-server package for debian out there. I have used that in some more basic servers with some degree of success, and less success with some of the more desktop-oriented distros (like Linux Mint); this way has worked on all debian-based distros I've tested thus far. If you know of a better way to do this, don't hesitate to Contact Me and let me know!
BE AWARE: I have made my 'server' available to the public, and can be accessed by anyone (this is on purpose); I have had multiple days where over 69GB of traffic has been utilized for this! My monthly report for this last month shows OVER 1.5TB of traffic for telnet alone! So if you have concerns about bandwidth usage/limitations, be careful about making this publicly available.
