2012-03-04
Remember the finger protocol? Once that ...
Remember the finger protocol? Once that was the way to publish information about yourself on the Internet before the whole worldwideweb thing and the concept of a 'homepage' started. But, finger gave/gives out too much information in the default settings, such as where you are logged in from (local terminal or network connection, complete with remote host name). I wanted to re-enable finger on my server at home, but did not want to 'leak' out this information. And I liked the concept of the 'people' command, which makes a list of users on multiple systems based on rwho data. But 'people' as a finger daemon likes to call the normal finger command when a name is given via the finger protocol, so finger user@host1@host2 would be forwarded, which is not what I like. The solution now is that I use cfingerd which does not give out information about sessions, hostnames and idle times. And cfingerd is in control, but calls people to create a list of logged-in users. End result: see for yourself, finger @koos.idefix.net. Or finger koos@koos.idefix.net. Temporarily not availabe via IPv6 because cfingerd gives a weird error when accessed via IPv6. For those places where finger isn't even installed, the user-listing looks like:koos@greenblatt:~$ people -H User Name Machine(s) --------- ------------------------------- ------------------------------- koos Koos van den Hout greenblattA bit of history: Adam Curry once managed to cause severe load on a finger server by announcing the "Cyber-Sleaze report" available via finger curryco@panix.com. Within 4 days panix asked him to stop publishing information this way because of unprecedented traffic on the finger service. Source: Cyber Sleaze - Adam Curry - alt.internet.services. Adam started mtv.com and published information like this via finger, gopher and later the world wide web.