Tjfinger

The correct title of this article is tjfinger. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions.

Overview

tjfinger is a finger program that will collect information from multiple hosts and display it on one listing. Thus, it is much easier to keep track of users in a multiple computer environment.

Installation

 ./configure
 make
 make install

This will put finger in /usr/local/bin, and fingerd, in.fingerd, and in.cfingerd in /usr/local/sbin. in.fingerd needs to be run on port 79 and in.cfingerd needs to be run on port 2003 (through inetd). Fingerd should _only_ run on the main finger server. in.fingerd takes an option. If it is on the main server, it should be invoked as in.fingerd -l, while if it is on another computer, it should be invoked as in.fingerd -s <IP or hostname of the main server>. in.fingerd also takes a -m option, the mailserver. This is only needed on the main server, and is done so that alias expansion can be done.

Each host should have a configuration file. Model after the provided tjfinger.conf. The clients only need the "datafile" field.

Sample configuration

Add the following line to /etc/services if it is not already in there:

 cfinger         2003/tcp

Add the following two lines to /etc/inetd.conf (after removing or commenting out all lines that refer to finger)

 finger  stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/in.fingerd -s finger.server.com -m mail.server.com
 cfinger stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/in.cfingerd

If you are configuring this on the server, then replace "-s finger.server.com" with "-l".

On the server, make it so that fingerd runs automatically on bootup. Also create a file /etc/tjfinger.conf. This file should look similar to the sample file. I think the format is pretty much self-explanatory.

Notes

Most of the text in this article was taken from the INSTALL and README files from tjfinger. Tjfinger was written by Ilia Mirkin and Jeffrey Grafton, and is released under the GNU General Public License.