NAME

in.fingerd - remote user information server

SYNOPSIS

in.fingerd [-g]

DESCRIPTION

in.fingerd is a daemon based on RFC 1288 and the Personal Information Protocol (PIP) that provides an interface to the finger and the pfinger programs. 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.

INVOCATION

The in.fingerd deamon is not a standalone server. It must be started by a ``super-server'' like inetd(8) and does not need to be run as root. Options to fingerd should be specified in /etc/inetd.conf. You may start it on the command line to test your configuration.

The PFinger in.fingerd does not print information about users that have a user id lower than 100 or about users that have a file .nofinger in their home directory. It also does not allow indirect fingers (e.g. user@hostA@hostB). Further the user information does not contain the users shell, home directory and last login time.

OPTIONS

in.fingerd accepts the following options:

-g: GNU Finger compatibility mode. If you use the GNU fingerd and in.cfingerd to gather information about a whole site, you can use this option to emulate the behaviour of the GNU in.fingerd program. This mainly means that the login information is taken from the GNU Finger hostdata file.
-c file: Use file as configuration file. Default is /etc/fingerconf
-v: Verbose output. Use this if something does somehow not work and you want to know more.
-V: Prints the version number and exits.
-d: Debug modus. Note: debugging must be compiled in.
-h: Prints a short option summary and exits.
-w -u -l -L -p: Ignored but accepted for compatibility reasons.

FILES

/etc/fingerconf: Host finger configuration.

RESTRICTIONS

Connecting directly to the server, using a telnet program, that tries to negotiate any options, will not work. Workaround: delete it and use a real telnet program.

BUGS

Report bugs to pfinger@xelia.ch