I have a need to have remote users Telnet into an application server on my network.

I installed openssh (ssh2) on a Mandrake 7.0 system. On the client side using (Putty) and told it to port foward to the application server using its IP address.

I when I connect to the ssh2 server, I authenticate keys (per the log file) enter a password and end up at a prompt.

Is it even possible to connect (via telnet) to a remote app server going through and authenticating with an SSH server without manual intervention of the user such as typing (telnet ip address) at the ssh2 server's prompt ??

AFAIK you can, in two ways.
First would be adding the command to the commandline you run ssh with, but I don't know if Putty allows adding a command.
Second option would be to add the command to the users authorized keys. See "man sshd" under "authorized_keys file format".

There is an easier solution. Your client's machine can port-forward some (highnumbered, then it requires no privileges) port to port 23 on your application server. Say "sshserver.your.net" is the ssh server, and app.your.net is your application server. One can telnet from sshserver to app.

Then the client can type/ make in putty

ssh -L 8199:app.your.net:23 sshserver.your.net
[authenticate by whatever means, keys, password, ... ]

Then, in another window,

telnet localhost 8199

On windows you can forward low-numbered ports w/o privileges, *I think*. You could go 23:app.your.net:23 and then simply telnet localhost.

sshserver and app could be the same machine, but your security is better when they are not.

I strongly recommend to my windows users to install cygwin, then you can type all those commands OR put them into a script. Once in a while some of our techs need to look at some internal webcams from home through ssh tunnels and we made them a bash script for cygwin and it works all the time.

Hope it helps,
mlp