NAME¶
in.fingerd —
remote user information
server
SYNOPSIS¶
| in.fingerd |
[-wulf]
[-pL path]
[-t
timeout] |
DESCRIPTION¶
Fingerd is a simple daemon based on
RFC1196 that provides an interface to the
“finger” program at most network sites. The program is supposed to
return a friendly, human-oriented status report on either the system at the
moment or a particular person in depth.
If the
-w option is given, remote users will get an additional
“Welcome to ...” banner which also shows some informations (e.g.
uptime, operating system name and release) about the system the
in.fingerd is running on. Some sites may consider this a
security risk as it gives out information that may be useful to crackers.
If the
-u option is given, requests of the form “finger
@host” are rejected.
If the
-l option is given, information about requests made is
logged. This option probably violates users' privacy and should not be used on
multiuser boxes.
If the
-f option is given, finger forwarding
(user@host1@host2) is allowed. Useful behind firewalls, but probably not wise
for security and resource reasons.
The
-p option allows specification of an alternate location
for in.fingerd to find the “finger” program. The
-L option is equivalent.
The
-t option specifies the time to wait for a request before
closing the connection. A value of 0 waits forever. The default is 60 seconds.
Options to in.fingerd should be specified in
/etc/inetd.conf.
The finger protocol consists mostly of specifying command arguments. The
inetd(8) “super-server” runs
in.fingerd for TCP requests received on port 79. Once
connected
in.fingerd reads a single command line terminated
by a ⟨CRLF⟩ which is passed to
finger(1). It
closes its connections as soon as all output is finished.
If the line is empty (i.e. just a ⟨CRLF⟩ is sent) then
finger returns a “default” report that lists all
people logged into the system at that moment. This feature is blocked by the
-u option.
If a user name is specified (e.g. eric⟨CRLF⟩) then the response
lists more extended information for only that particular user, whether logged
in or not. Allowable “names” in the command line include both
“login names” and “user names”. If a name is
ambiguous, all possible derivations are returned.
SEE ALSO¶
finger(1),
inetd(8)
RESTRICTIONS¶
Connecting directly to the server from a TIP or an equally narrow-minded
TELNET-protocol user program can result in meaningless attempts at option
negotiation being sent to the server, which will foul up the command line
interpretation.
HISTORY¶
The finger daemon appeared in
4.3BSD.
