I wanted to do something historical, and set up a simple finger service on my server.
As finger is totally outdated today due to security and privacy concerns, I decided to implement something very simple that is still the reminiscence of the internet of the 1980's.
Finger used to have a feature to show the contents of the user's .plan and .project files. Today's equivalent of this would be to show the recent activity on social media sites. I decided to go with twitter.
Not only that, but I also used the totally undocumented GitHub Skyline API to show a nice chart about contributions during the year.
It works on the traditional finger port (79), but it's not compliant to RFC 1288, as it is just my server, with a single user. It's more like an auto response when somebody connects.
We live in the 21st century, and everything is on the the web nowadays, so I added a second access point and exposed it on http and on websocket as well. Creating a website allowed me to play with connection speeds a bit. The websocket endpoint supports multiple protocols such as 9600 or 56000, corresponding to well known modem speeds.
Navigate to https://finger.csokavar.hu to see it in action or open the developer window at https://csokavar.hu.
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I tried to make it simple and wrapped it in a Dockerfile. All you have to do is to edit the config.json.
You get the twitter_auth tokens by registering a developer account and creating an app
at https://developer.twitter.com/.
Now test it with
./service run
And in a separate window:
finger @localhost
You can also try it in the browser by opening http://localhost:7979/#9600, some regular
modem speeds can be added after the #, such as 2400, 4800, 9600, 14400, 19200, 28800, 33600, 56000.
If you want to access the websocket through SSL, you need to set up a proxy that terminates the SSL connection and forwards the requests to the finger service in your container.
Supposed that the http_port is set to the 7979 in your config.json adjust your nginx
config file like this:
server {
listen 443 ssl
... other settings ...
location ~ ^/finger {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:7979;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}
}