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From: armstron@cs.arizona.edu (Jim Armstrong)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Fingeree wants to keep track of the fingerer
Keywords: finger monitor
Message-ID: <1363@caslon.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 91 01:55:09 GMT
References: <10290@hub.ucsb.edu> <1991Apr8.020222.11776@athena.mit.edu>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 30

In article <1991Apr8.020222.11776@athena.mit.edu> jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>In article <10290@hub.ucsb.edu>, 6600hubb@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Richard Hubbell) writes:
>|> 	Does unix offer a method for keeping track of each
>|> occurence of being fingered?  i.e. if someone fingers me is there
>|> a way that I can tell who it was that fingered me? 
 
>  If you are not the superuser, and you want to do this anyway, and your
>system supports named pipes, and your system's fingerd has no problem with
>reading from a named pipe, then you can do this by creating a named pipe as
>your .plan file, and running a process opens the pipe, selects it for write,
>and whenever it is ready for write, figures out what process is doing the
>reading and does monitoring stuff on that process, and then sends your .plan
>file over the pipe.
 
About a month ago there was a sample program posted to this newsgroup that
set up a FIFO named pipe as your .plan file.  I modified the code to set up
a simple (perhaps naive) finger monitor for users on my machine.  The process
running on the other end of the pipe basically did a ps au whenever someone
fingered me to find out who it was.  The information could be stored in a
file for later inspection or used to print a personal hello message as part
of the .plan to whoever fingered me.  Of course, this brings up the infamous
'caller id' discussion as to whether this is really ethical.  I know that I
like to be able to finger another user without my identity revealed, and I 
have since returned that sense of privacy to the other users on this host.
 

-- 
Jim Armstrong			  "The nonpayment and subsequent abuse of
armstron@cs.arizona.edu		  socially powerless athletes is simply a
uunet!arizona!armstron            form of modern-day slavery" --Rick Telander