How do I telnet programmatically?

Actually that might be the wrong question. Here's what I want to do:

I want to write a small app that periodically polls my ADSL router and
retrieves the current line speed. In order to do that manually I can telnet
to it, then go through a 'username' and 'password' prompt, then issue the
command 'adsl info'. After than the telnet session can be killed.

What would be the best way to do this in Cocoa?

The router (a USR model) _does_ have a web interface, but it would still
requite authentication and I'm not sure the info page is a discreet HTML
page, but rather some sort of javascripty stuff.

Many thanks for any pointers, no pun intended.

Jim
--
http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk http://twitter.com/GreyAreaUK

Things our resident MCSE didn't know how to do today:
Forward a port on a router. Even when being talked through it

Jim wrote:
> I want to write a small app that periodically polls my ADSL router and
> retrieves the current line speed. In order to do that manually I can telnet
> to it, then go through a 'username' and 'password' prompt, then issue the
> command 'adsl info'. After than the telnet session can be killed.

telnet is an extremely simple protocol. you create a tcp/ip stream connection
to a server, send lines to it terminated with CR/LF pairs, and it sends lines
back in exactly the same fashion.

you can do this easily with plain old bsd sockets. here's the first tutorial
i googled up:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Programming/BSD_Sockets_programm
ing_in_C_with_examples


> What would be the best way to do this in Cocoa?

there may be a cocoa wrapper around bsd sockets, i don't know. personally i
always use the raw socket interface, which is a perfectly reasonable approach
in a cocoa program, so i've never investigated such a thing.