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From: hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: Efficient fingerd?
Date: 26 Jan 1994 06:41:51 GMT
Organization: Computing Center, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
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nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar) writes:
: Our passwd setup is also pretty monstrous - 2000 entries over yp.

Similar to Swarthmore' setup.  I've found that YP lookups for entries
above 1000 or so tend to take a very long time.

You may want to have all finger requests go to the machine that has
the /etc/passwd on local disk (instead of YP) and make a hashed version
of it using mkpasswd.  Finger should find entries quickly then.

: I know there's GNU finger, but I've had some bad experiences with it
: in the past

I wouldn't recommend GNU finger on my worst enemy.  It has a lot of bugs, a
lot of silly assumptions which I didn't agree with and made me nervous about
having to run as root (gads) which the documentation even *recommended*!
Yikes!

The only useful feature of GNU finger I miss is being able to finger
an entry that wasn't in the /etc/passwd file by just deposting a file
in a directory.  That was nice.  One day, I'll hack that in to

	decuac.dec.com:/pub/sources/finger.tar.Z

Has someone done this already?  If so, please let us know!  I have way
too much work to do fun stuff like this soon.

-- 
hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai) | Unix Geek for Swarthmore College
I don't speak for Swarthmore College | Computing Center, Swarthmore, PA, USA

"I post, therefore I am." -Rene Descartes on Usenet
<A HREF="http://www.cc.swarthmore.edu/hirai/">Click me.</A>