Free C# (or general .NET) Telnet Library?

[Spud1]

I am writing a small app to connect to our local unix servers and run a few commands, read the response and output it in a windows form.

The problem is that microsoft didn't include any telnet libraries with .net, or ssh for that matter. I *could* spend a week or two writing my own basic library, and ultimately this is the best way as I only have to give it the features I need; but I know next to nothing about .net socket programming and am on a time limit for this, so an off-the-shelf library is my best option for now.

So, anyone know of any decent ones that a free/open source? I have found a few that seem fairly competent, but as usual with free ones the documentation is either rubbish or none-existent, and they seem fairly complex to use.

I am currently working with this one: http://www.klausbasan.de/misc/telnet/index.html

which is very promising, I have managed to login to a server from it, but get stuck reading back the output from commands (even basic ones like "pwd")

I will keep going and get it working in the end, but does anyone know of a better library? even better if you have actually used it

Cheers for any help,

Spud/Pete

[TheAnimus]

i remeber a code project artical a few months back!

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/terminalcontrol.asp

sounds as thou it might be able to help you a bit.

[Spud1]

Yeah thats pretty cool thanks

I have managed to adapt the code from the one I linked to above to get back an output from my commands (by filling the buffer with the entire contents of the shell screen [40 lines] and then reading that into an array and parsing it line by line), but i'm sure there could be a better way of doing it.

The problem seems to be that most of the libries are designed around a terminal emulator app - ie they are designed to provide a telnet client like interface (like putty or windows telnet), whereas I want more of a reflection style send a command, get a response type.

I will have another play when I get to work tomorrow and see

[yamangman]

Possibly round-a-bout but couldn't the app connect to a web server on the machine that could in turn run the commands.

[Spud1]

not in this case no

It is designed to run a status check for our documentum docbases (think of them like databases) on each of our unix servers, by running a shell script I created on each server. We can't run web-servers on them for various business reasons, so telnet or ssh is our only option really (as this app also needs to be able to run on any windows XP machine wiht .net 1.1 or higher, so has to use standard stuff.)

I will get it working though, it's a fun challange Maybe i will even do my own telnet library one day, if i get time to learn how to use sockets in C#

[directhex]

telnet is horrendously insecure - how about running some kind of daemon on the servers for monitoring purposes, which can then report back, in a more friendly manner? you could write the daemon in c#, using either lots of System.Diagnostics.Process or Mono.Unix.Native calls to get the data, then feed it back without ever exposing things like cleartext password info

[Spud1]

It's a good idea hex but more complex than i'm allowed to make it. It's a big company I am working in (near the end of my uni placement) and you know what their rules can be like, in this case I have to use these shell scripts that are on the server. In any case those scripts are crontabbed to run a few times a day and report problems by email. They just want this user friendly way to manually check up on them for the support team.

I can use ssh but it's just more complex than telnet, and we don't need the security as this is all running on a intranet.

[Spud1]

Just an update - I have it working now using the telnet libraries from the link in my first post

I was having big problems getting the full output of my commands, but it turned out to be a timing issue, and waiting for the next prompt to appear seems to work reliably, given that I know the expected output of the scripts (and any other output means I throw a custom exception)

thanks for the suggestions though