Celestial Software

With the rapid development of the product over the past few years, and since Absolute Telnet now has host integration features, I'd like to propose a feature to address these (to be added to the large wishlist, I'm sure):

It would be very helpful to be able to query the version of A/T from the host; not only would this assist with the discernment of specific features available, but also with configuration management. Should an organization wish to implement some emulator-dependent features in the host program, knowing that 30% of their clients are running a version of A/T that is more than 2 years old may prompt a batch upgrade. Windows-centric shops may use server-based products such as SMS for workstation configuration management, but for us DEC/Sun/Linux shops with windows clients (in which A/T plays a large role), software inventory of the connecting windows clients can only be determined by the individual HTTP, SMB, telnet/SSH connection requests.

I'd like to use the Z-Modem remote execution for tighter windows integration with the host apps, but I think only about 10% of my clients have A/T of version 5.44 or higher. A terminal version identification string would help me to help them locate the workstations that won't be able to use my new features.

TIA for your consideration,
Doug Campbell

WRT to the previous post, I just looked up the VT Device Attributes (DA) reports that might be used to determine the remote terminal version. I assume that the A/T version could be considered "firmware", so the secondary DA request might be used.

When sending the secondary DA request,
CSI > 0 c
from the host to A/T, the client gives a response of
CSI > 1 ; 10 ; 0 c
which indicates VT220, firmware version 1.0, no options.

Perhaps that firmware version could be reported as 535 (the workstation I was using had A/T v5.35) so that the host could know what special features it could utilize on the connected terminal.

I'm sure you can think of a dozen other VT CSI codes that might be more appropriate for this purpose.

Doug Campbell

BTW, my VT codes research came from VT100.net

The problem with changing the implementation of those standard codes is that Absolute is supposed to report those values from the terminal being emulated, not values related to Absolute itself.

The right way to do this is probably through setting a shell environment variable with the current version number. The problem with this is that it would only work in the version where I implement it and only on servers that support the option (OpenSSH 3.9 and up I believe). This helps for all new users, but doesn't help you determine the version from your installed user base.

Regardless of how it is implemented, it would be new code for you, and a response/value that would not be present in all previous versions. I think the ability to query the remote version of A/T would be a big benefit, even if "old" versions simply have empty replies. Gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere.