OSX High Sierra - the missing utils

The missing utilities


Following the official demise of PPTP a few updates ago Apple seems to have continued retiring features in High Sierra. In particular High Sierra has dropped a couple of utilities that we dinosaurs still use:
  • telnet
  • ftp
Whilst old and not supporting the shiniest security models they are still needed for debugging and ensuring that backward compatible systems remain that way.

Telnet


Fortunately this is a simple fix:

Home Brew (
brew.sh) makes installing the fix a snap.

brew install telnet
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
No changes to formulae.

==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/telnet-54.50.1.high_sierra.
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring telnet-54.50.1.high_sierra.bottle.tar.gz
🍺 /usr/local/Cellar/telnet/54.50.1: 4 files, 245.9KB

FTP


Fortunately sftp is still present … the lukemftp client from Apple’s open source repository can be built and installed on High Sierra by:

wget https://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/lukemftp/lukemftp-16.tar.gz
gzcat lukemftp-16.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd lukemftp-16
cd tnftp
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-ipv6
make
cd src
sudo make install