FINGERD(8)

💖 FINGERD(8) 💖

okay bestie, so this is the fingerd(8) page from the System Manager's Manual and it's giving "old-school daemon that still kinda eats" energy, so let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

fingerd — the remote user information server, aka the lil server that tells you who's online 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

fingerd [-wulf] [-pL path] [-t timeout]

look at her. compact. iconic. no notes 🔥

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So fingerd is a simple daemon based on RFC1196 that gives you an interface to the finger program at most network sites. The whole point of the program is to return a friendly, human-oriented status report — either about the system at this exact moment, or about one particular person in depth. it's literally a vibe check for your users 💖

If you pass the -w option, remote users get an extra "Welcome to ..." banner, and that banner also shows some informations about the system fingerd is running on (think uptime, operating system name and release, that kind of thing). But listen — some sites may consider this a security risk, because it hands out information that may be useful to crackers 😭 so think before you flex.

If you pass the -u option, requests of the form finger @host are rejected. no system-wide snooping for you, bestie 🙈

If you pass the -l option, information about requests made gets logged. ngl, this option probably violates users' privacy and should not be used on multiuser boxes. we do not stan 💀

If you pass the -f option, finger forwarding (user@host1@host2) is allowed. Useful behind firewalls, but probably not wise for security and resource reasons. it's giving "convenient but chaotic" 🧚

The -p option lets you specify an alternate location for fingerd to find the finger program. The -L option is equivalent — they're twins, no cap 👑

The -t option specifies the time to wait for a request before closing the connection. A value of 0 waits forever. The default is 60 seconds. patience is a virtue or whatever ⭐

Starting and stopping the daemon is handled by systemd(1). Fun fact: fingerd is not enabled by default after the installation. Its running state can be managed using systemctl(1) commands. And if you need to specify some options to fingerd, you should copy the finger@.service file from /lib/systemd/system to /etc/systemd/system and edit it there. that's the whole move, periodt 🎀

The finger protocol consists mostly of specifying command arguments. The systemd(1) runs fingerd for TCP requests received on port 79. Once connected, fingerd reads a single command line terminated by a ⟨CRLF⟩ which is passed to finger(1). It closes its connections as soon as all output is finished. clean. efficient. main character energy ✨

If the line is empty (i.e. just a ⟨CRLF⟩ is sent) then finger returns a "default" report that lists all people logged into the system at that moment. This feature is blocked by the -u option. 🚫

If a user name is specified (e.g. eric⟨CRLF⟩) then the response lists more extended information for only that particular user, whether logged in or not. Allowable "names" in the command line include both "login names" and "user names". And if a name is ambiguous, all possible derivations are returned. mystery solved, detective 🕵️💜

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• finger(1)
• systemd(1)
• systemctl(1)

go read those too, iykyk 🦋

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🚧 RESTRICTIONS 🚧

Connecting directly to the server from a TIP or an equally narrow-minded TELNET-protocol user program can result in meaningless attempts at option negotiation being sent to the server, which will foul up the command line interpretation. so like… don't do that 🙈💀

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📜 HISTORY 📜

The finger daemon appeared in 4.3BSD. ancient. legendary. grandmother of the group chat 💅🌈

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okay that's the whole page bestie, go forth and finger responsibly 🫶

Linux NetKit (0.17) 🌸 August 29, 1996 — yeah she's vintage, she's a classic, and she still slays 💖✨👑