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From: rdmurray@twirl.bitdance.com (R. David Murray)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: Finger command to trigger mail download...
Date: 29 Nov 1996 12:10:26 -0500
Organization: BitDance Enterprises
Lines: 44
Message-ID: <57n5e2$s2d@twirl.bitdance.com>
References: <329c6a56.179627170@news.charm.net> <329C82AD.41C6@arlut.utexas.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: twirl.bitdance.com
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #2 (NOV)
Ian Fink <fink@arlut.utexas.edu> writes:
>Sean Rolinson wrote:
>> I am wondering if anyone has heard of a finger command to trigger
>> email download, and how to accomplish such a task.
>GNU's finger allows you to run a shell script when fingering
>a specific user :) You might look into that.
With BSDI's finger, I did the following:
1) in inetd.conf, changed the entry for finger to launch
finger -p /usr/local/libexec/finger-handler
2) wrote said finger-handler script, which looks like this:
-----
#!/bin/sh -
echo $* >>/var/log/finger.log
if [ "$1" = "sendqueue" -a "$2" = "206.97.232.18" ]; then
echo "sendqueue run for 206.97.232.18" >>/var/log/finger.log
echo "Starting mailqueue run..."
sendmail -qRdeclabs
echo "...complete."
else
echo "Personal information is kept confidential by default."
fi
-----
So if the customer does a 'finger "sendqueue 206.97.232.18"@smtp.xyz.net',
the sendmail queue is run for that user. You could have the else clause
do a normal finger if you like having finger enabled. I suspect that you
are running into a mail gateway package that wants to use this method
to get the queue run. I had a customer who made the same request. That
customer turned into a dedicated line customer before we got around to
finding out what query string the mail package was sending. Probably it
is just the IP address, in which case you can just change the if statement
above to remove the 'sendqueue' string.
Have fun. Note that this technique does no authentication, and therefore
is a hole allowing a denial of service attack.
--David