The Finger Daemon Project

General Information

I am maintaining an enhanced version of a custom fingerd originally written by Mike Shanzer. This release started as a security enhancement to Mike's original, but has grown to be a more complete and modern implementation with command-line options mostly compatible with those of the native daemon included in NetBSD, as well as supporting additional unique features.

Description

fingerd implements the server side Remote User Information Program (RUIP) of the the FINGER (or NAME) protocol, specified in RFC-1288. The FINGER protocol provides a remote interface to programs which display information on system status and individual system users. The protocol imposes little structure on the format of the exchange between client and server. The client provides a single command line to the fingerd server which then normally returns a friendly human-oriented status report listing the users of the system at the moment, or an in-depth report of information about a particular user.

This version of fingerd is indended to be run from inetd, which is normally configured to start it when connections arrive on TCP port #79. Each client connection is handed to a freshly created fingerd process which reads a single ASCII carriage-return and linefeed terminated command line from the client.

fingerd uses an access control file to see if user listings from the originating host (and optionally the originating user) are permitted, and what permissions are granted to the client host (and user). If user listings are allowed, and if the request sepcifies a user-name then fingerd checks to see if that user-name is listed in a ``users'' file. If the requested user-name is listed in the ``users'' file, the program specified for that user-name is run. Otherwise the finger program is run with the appropriate options. Output from whichever program is run is passed back to the client.

Features

So, just what does this fingerd have to offer? Here's a list of some of the most interesting features taken from the README file in the latest release:

• Good portability. This release can be configured using a script generated by GNU Autoconf, and can be built with makefiles generated by GNU Automake. There's also a BSD-style makefile included that contains pre-set configurations for the likes of NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and such.
• 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 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 optionally execute programs when FINGER requests for specified users are received and will return the output of such programs to the remote client.
• except for the last mentioned feature it should be quite secure. It normally should be run as an unpriviledged user and it does not need to own any files, etc.
• 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!

Release Information

As of the last time this web page was updated the current release was: 1.4.

You can read about the history of user-visible changes up to the current release in the online copy of the NEWS file.

The most recent release is always available as ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/fingerd.tar.gz .

Documentation

You can read the fingerd manual page online.

FreshMeat.net Reference

My version of fingerd is listed on FreshMeat.net at http://freshmeat.net/projects/fingerd/

Future Plans

You can read about any ideas I've recorded for possible future implementation in the online copy of the ToDo file.

You might also find new entries in the current version of the NEWS file from my working directory.

History

The original version of fingerd upon which this version is based was available until recently from ftp://ftp.foobar.com/pub/fingerd-1.3.tar.gz.

As Mike said in the last copy of http://www.foobar.com/home/shanzer/fingerd.html I was able to find: ``I have not touched this code in like 4 years [[note he means since 1995, so now almost 5 years as of the 1.4 release of this version]]. It should still all work, but it is not currently in active development.''