Enabling telnetd on Raspbian

I am setting up a Raspberry Pi to be a remote server (you know, a mainframe) for ancient computers that don’t have the CPU power to use SSH. I ran into an issue where after installing telnetd the service could not be found and would not start. It seems that the Debian team has done the sane thing and made sure this insecure service couldn’t be enabled by accident.

I found the solution on this forum post and I am putting the relevant bits here for future reference.

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Edit /etc/inetd.conf and uncomment line 23 (line number is just a co-incidence).

#:STANDARD: These are standard services.
telnet  stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd  /usr/sbin/telnetd
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Restart the inetd service

sudo systemctl restart inetutils-inetd.service