Whatever you send to its port gets echoed right back. It's lost forever. It generates characters. If you're ever really bored, telnet to the chargen port of a fast machine on a T-3. Echoes the time.
Some places use it.
Essentially the same as time. Services such as klogin, eklogin, kshell, ekshell, and kauth are kerberos authenticated versions of services mentioned above. It's such a simple thing to do but many system administrators set themselves up for a lot of frustration by forgetting. I'd like to wrap up by apologizing for doing such a simplistic article for the first issue of this ezine. Next time we will discuss TCP Wrappers.