how to start telnet service on fedora17

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Fedora maintains a wiki page about systemd & systemctl.

But on Fedora 17 the telnet server is treated by xinetd.

1. Start first your xinetd service => sudo systemctl start xinetd.service
2. enable telnet service via xinetd => sudo chkconfig telnet on
3. verify that xinetd is listening to the telnet port (23) => sudo netstat -t -a -p | grep xinetd.

and if it is positive, you can test locally => telnet localhost.

The first step to start telnet service is: DON'T. It's insecure: anything you type, including your password, will be in plaintext, visible to anyone with a packet sniffer. Telnet has long been superseded by OpenSSH for shell access.

Assuming that you know that, and have a good reason to run a telnet service, here's what you'd need to do to start it:

As root,

yum install telnet-server

systemctl start telnet.socket

And if you want it to run on boot,

systemctl enable telnet.socket

If you want outside access to your telnet service, you'd need to poke the appropriate holes in your firewall. Which, again, would be a bad idea.