Connecting to SLTalker via SSL

I've missed the opportunity to see Wong Kar Wai's latest movie this evening, so instead, I kept the ride of "coding for talkers" from this morning, when I made a Twitter reader for Selva, and decided to finaly implement SSL for SLTalker. For those that do not know, SLTalker is a personal project of mine of implementing a talker-like interface for Second Life.

So, how to connect via telnet over SSL? Easy: the host is portugal-virtual.org and the port is 123. If you're in GNU/Linux or any *nix-like environment you can try

telnet -z ssl portugal-virtual.org 123

If you get an error saying that the -z option isn't available is because you don't have netkit's telnet-ssl package installed. Another option (bad choice in terms of usability, but this one works also on Windows) is to use OpenSSL and try:

openssl s_client -host portugal-virtual.org -port 123

Now, if you want a decent client, I recommend you to try out the popular TinyFugue (best known as tf), that already has SSL support in it's 5.0 version (still in beta). This is the only alternative I know to OpenSSL for Windows.

If you try this and have some feedback. please leave a comment. And yes, I know you're waiting for new features, bugs fixed and more usability: I'm working on that, but I'm yet far from ready to a new (and quite different) release. Bare with me...