You are confusing telnet the client program and telnet the protocol/server. They are *different*. Telnet the program is just making a socket connection for you and displaying the IO in a shell type environment. You can't get a connection on 3333 which is the problem. Your script will fail to get a socket on 3333 as well. FIREWALL or DEAD DEAMON is the reason it does not work. Anyway telnet can connect to any socket server, You can telnet into your SMTP server on 25, HTTP server on 80, POP3 server on 110 or *any other socket server on any other port*. If you know the protocol you can talk to them. For example I can send myself email via telnet (the program, not the protocol/server) connecting to an SMTP server on port 25 because I know the protocol (I typed the HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, DATA, blah . , QUIT lines). Knowing basic SMTP and POP3 etc is often useful to debug connectivity issues FWIW. Rather than just ping you telnet into the server and say Gday.

[root@devel3 root]# telnet perlmonk.org 25
Trying 199.5.193.8...
Connected to perlmonk.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 perlmonk.org ESMTP Exim 3.36 #1 Mon, 04 Oct 2004 19:35:40 -0400
HELO devel3.xxx.org
250-perlmonk.org Hello devel3.xxx.org [64.xxx.xxx.xxx]
250-SIZE
250-PIPELINING
250 HELP
MAIL FROM: tachyon@perlmonk.org
250 <tachyon@perlmonk.org> is syntactically correct
RCPT TO: tachyon@perlmonk.org
250 <tachyon@perlmonk.org> is syntactically correct
DATA
354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
Hello me,

Telnet (the program, not the protocol/server) can be used 
to do all sorts of cool stuff. Try telnet perlmonks.org 80
and then type: "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" no quotes \n == [ENTER]

To pick up your email via POP3 you telnet pop3server 110 then:
USER username
PASS password
LIST
RETR n
QUIT

Bye for now
.
250 OK id=1CEcPR-0000yC-00
QUIT
221 perlmonk.org closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
[root@devel3 root]#
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