The Telnet service, as introduced in the beginning of this user guide, is a network service that provides a non-secure way to log in and gain command-line access to the server.
Only users with a user account that provides shell access can log into the server via Telnet. For security reasons, the root user cannot log in directly via Telnet. If you need to do something as the root user on a Freedom 400x or above, you should first log in as your administrative user, and then become root with the su command.
Telnetd is the name of the server application that provides the Telnet service. It is spawned by the xinetd application whenever you or someone else attempts to connect to the server via Telnet.
Remember that SSH is the preferred login protocol, not Telnet. The use of Telnet is discouraged, as data transferred between you and your virtual server in a Telnet session is not encrypted. If you are able to use SSH, we recommend that you turn off the Telnet service altogether using the inetctl command, which is discussed in a separate section of this guide.