IN.IDENTTESTD(8)

💖 IN.IDENTTESTD — Library functions, but make it a vibe 💖

okay bestie, so this one's from section 8 of the manual (that's the daemons-and-admin-stuff section, iykyk) and it's called in.identtestd. it's literally the friendliest little test daemon you'll ever meet. let's get into it 💅

---

✨ NAME ✨

in.identtestd — a tiny little daemon that exists for one (1) job: testing Ident servers 🎀

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

in.identtestd

that's it. that's the whole thing. no flags, no args, no drama. iconic behavior honestly.

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so in.identtestd is a small daemon, and the whole point is that you start it from inetd. once it's up, if you telnet into it, it does an ident lookup on you. that's the bit. 🫶

what's it for? literally just verifying that your Ident server is working correctly. vibe check for your Ident server, if you will. ✨

and if you wanna peek at the source code, it lives in the libident source tarball, under the name identtester.c. go look, it's cute in there 🍓

---

🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

a typical entry in /etc/inetd.conf would look like this:

9999 stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/in.identtestd in.identtestd

so once that entry is in place and active, you just run telnet hostname 9999 — and you can do that from this system or from another system, either one, no notes. it should show you something like this:

Trying hostname...
Connected to hostname.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to the IDENT server tester, version 2.0

(Linked with libident 0.30)

Connecting to Ident server at 192.168.1.1...
Querying for lport 1109, fport 9999....
Reading response data...
Userid response is:
   Lport........ 1109
   Fport........ 9999
   Opsys........ UNIX
   Charset...... <not specified>
   Identifier... paul
Connection closed by foreign host.

not it spilling all your Ident tea like that 😭 but yes that's the whole experience, start to finish 💜

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Peter Eriksson <pen@lysator.liu.se> 💖

and the manpage was written for Debian by Paul Slootman <paul@debian.org>. shoutout to both of them, absolute legends 🫶

---

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• ident(3)
• identd(8)
• xinetd(8)

go read those next, bestie, they're the whole friend group 🌸

---

and that's the page!! 💅 this one came from the 3rd Berkeley Distribution and its manual page tag is IN.IDENTTESTD(8). mwah, love that for us 🎀✨