FINGERD -- A safer and more configurable version of this infamous daemon FINGER was first invented by Les Earnest at SAIL. https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/ "1972 Social networking and blogging service (FINGER) was initially just for SAIL but became a network service in 1975, " This is a much updated version of Mike Shanzer's fingerd-1.3. This is a re-written, more secure, and more functional version of the traditional fingerd. So, just what does this fingerd have to offer? - it has much enhanced logging. - it supports access control lists (ACLs): you can restrict finger requests to certain hosts (and certain users within trusted networks if you trust your identd, aka RFC-1413 nee RFC-931). - does not forward requests by default (in accordance with the recommendations of RFC 1288) - has other command-line and ACL control options to optionally implement further recommendations of RFC 1288, such as one to completely disable user name matching, one to prevent sending of user lists (i.e. listing all currently logged in users), another to turn off sending of ~/.plan files, and finally one to prevent sending of GECOS (office and telephone number sub-fields) and/or home directory. - it sports a "message of the day" file for sending host-wide announcements, disclaimers, etc. - it can execute programs when finger requests for specified users are received and will return the output of such programs to the remote user. - except for the last mentioned feature it should be secure. It normally should be run as an unprivileged user and it does not need to own any files, etc.; needing only access to its own (optional) configuration files. - even with all of this it should be much simpler to configure and use than most any of the other so-called "enhanced" versions of fingerd -- it's certainly smaller and simpler, code-wise, than some of them! TO BUILD FINGERD This release of fingerd was primarily done as an example of packaging a portable program with a BSD Make Makefile and additional helper Makefile fragments for stand-alone builds. In general you need only run the following to build and install: mkdir -p build; MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=$(pwd)/build bsdmake MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=$(pwd)/build bsdmake DESTDIR=/usr/local install (This assumes you are using a BSD "make", which you must. Just do it!) FOR MORE INFORMATION If you have any troubles, questions, or feature requests, for fingerd you can send mail to <bugs@robohack.planix.com>, or open an issue on GitHub. The lastest version of this software is available at: <URL:https://github.com/robohack/fingerd> <URL:ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Planix/fingerd.tar.gz> <URL:http://www.planix.com/ftp/pub/Planix/fingerd.tar.gz> -- Greg A. Woods <woods-fingerd@planix.ca>