You probably don't want to set up telnet from the internet. If you can do it, then anyone can do it from the internet. The login and password are readily available if you haven't changed the password. If you have changed the password then it is transmitted as plain text for any snooper to read. Ssh would give you a lot more security and you can specify the port to open. PuTTY is an ssh client that you can use on your remote computer. PuTTY is free and available for all popular OS's

Hope this helps.

The short answer: you need to use port forwarding for telnet as well as ssh. By default, Telnet servers listen on TCP port 23.

The long answer:
Traffic originating from outside your LAN must go through your router. Your router needs to know where to send the data when it receives the data. The router uses port forwarding to determine where to send the data. Traffic originating from inside the LAN and going to the internet (e.g. a browser) is handled by the router without port forwarding because it knows where the data came from.

The Pogoplug is able work without port forwarding as it maintains a link from within the LAN to my.pogoplug.com.

We definitely don't recommend using Telnet, and the firmware being pushed out starting tonight disables Telnet on the Pogoplug. SSH will be disabled by default, however a new Security tab has been added to the Settings page where you can enable SSH and also set the password.

Accessing outside of home means getting a DynDNS URL, forwarding port 21 on your router to your Pogoplug's IP, and enabling SSH in the security settings. Then, to connect, you would use "ssh root@yourdnsurl.dyndns.com"

one would think that the MyPogoplug would have that information since it
is connected to the Pogoplug device. so, what about it Pogoplug folks - could
you give us info, say via the Settings page ?

thanks.