fingerd (8)
NAME
fingerd - GNU finger server daemon
SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/fingerd [options]
DESCRIPTION
fingerd is a daemon that runs permanently on a finger server host peri-
odically polling its client hosts to keep the global finger databases
up to date. It cooperates with two other daemons that are invoked on
demand: in.cfingerd to reply to polls on the client hosts, and in.fin-
gerd to read the databases and prepare formatted output on request by a
user.
fingerd looks in the hostconfig(5) file for the server and lserver
hostnames to verify that is is running on an appropriate host. It also
scans client specifications in that file to set up its list of finger
clients to poll.
In its first polling cycle, it will try to obtain a full dump of each
clients lastlog database to initialize the global user database.
OPTIONS
-connect-timeout timeout
Sets the time after which a polling connection attempt
fails to timeout microseconds. The default is .75 sec-
onds. A timeout of 0 specifies that the default of the
underlying system be used. Hosts that cannot establish
connection in the specified amount of time will be con-
sidered down.
-poll-timeout timeout
Sets the time allowed for a read on the polling connec-
tion to return data, in microseconds. The default is
1.5 seconds, but may have to be increased considerably
depending on the expected amount of data and the load on
the client system. A timeout of 0 specifies waiting
forever until data arrives.
-poll-interval interval
Specifies the number of seconds the finger daemon will
sleep between polling cycles. The default is 2 minutes.
Note the maximum age of the polled data is given by this
interval plus the time that the polling cycle itself
takes.
-poll-debug Track the polling cycle with debugging output. For each
client polled, its name and number of packets returned
is logged.
-debug Full debugging output. In addition to the information
printed by -poll-debug, this also prints the finger
packets returned by each poll. Also, the daemon will
not detach itself into the background, and connection
timeouts are disabled. Error messages and debugging
output is directed to stderr rather than the system log.
SIGNALS
SIGHUP Reread clients list and tty locations database (for
Host database of current logins.
/usr/ccrma/share/finger/userdata
User database of most recent logins.
/usr/ccrma/share/finger/clientstatus
Client info database.
SEE ALSO
finger(1), cfingerd(8), hostconfig(5), Emacs Info on finger.
BUGS
Databases not optimized for very large number of hosts/users.
Outdated finger packets from hosts that are down are not discarded if
local and remote hostnames do not match.
Gateway polling is naive, will not prevent packets from circulating
back to the originating server.
$Date: 1993/01/03 02:03:37 $ fingerd(8)