*BSD News Article 91541


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From: myke@phluffy.cyberport.net (Mike Holling)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Quick DNS and telnet/ftp query.
Date: 18 Mar 1997 18:13:04 GMT
Organization: Cyberport Montana.
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Message-ID: <slrn5itmpf.3f0.myke@phluffy.cyberport.net>
References: <332E3238.41C67EA6@silas.cc.monash.edu.au> <5gmakb$icd@ui-gate.utell.co.uk>
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>> Finally, given that my domain name is icon.com.au is there anyway to set
>> up finger so that it will report all users using a machine on that
>> domain ? 
>> i.e. finger icon.com.au reports who is logged in on t-rex.icon.com.au,
>> bob.icon.com.au, fred.icon.com.au etc... ?
>
>Not that I know of unless there's a very smart fingerd on a machine
>that's really called icon.com.au and that's capable of talking to
>lots of other fingerds (on *.icon.com.au).  The normal way to set
>this sort of thing up is to have icon.com.au as an MX record (no
>actual A record).  This means that anything @icon.com.au is invalid
>unless you're talking smtp.

GNU finger does this, along with many other things.  You can get it at

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/finger-1.37.tar.gz

and many other places.  To see what it does, try

finger @lm.com

The GNU fingerd needs to be running on all machines you want to monitor.
There are the usual security concerns, as GNU finger gives finger users the
ability to find out all kinds of information.  Whether this is a useful
feature or potential security problem depends on the nature of your system.

- Mike