fingerd allows third party fingers

[Tony Nardo]

In article <381 at mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> poseur!earle at mahendo.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) writes:
>Allowing third party `finger's also allows one to `reach around' a site
>that has a gateway with ipforwarding turned off.  Admittedly, one has
>to know something about the layout of the network behind the curtain
>(where Carol Merrill is now standing (^: ), but hey, Mr. Morris has taught
>us a thing (fing?) or two about fingerd ...

These third party "finger" probes are also good for telling if a remote node is
really down or if the routing tables have been hit by the Routing Render :-(.

Until the whole UNIX World is blessed with properly functioning name servers,
there will be some sites which can not be reached by "finger" *EXCEPT* with
the third party "finger" capacity.  My native site, "warper", is an example
of this.  (Conceded, "warper" can be reached directly via the raw Internet #,
but anyone with access to *that* doesn't need to use it anyway.)

Even then, third party "finger" access is necessary to reach some sites which
are not on the main Internet.  (`Can you say "local network"?  I thought you
could.')  No matter how good name servers become, there is *at least* one site
I know of that I can not reach without routing thru a specific third party.


I had once thought that an "ultimate origin" field in "sockaddr" would be
useful.  Unfortunately, short of passing *every* internet node # in the path
along, site on local networks could still evade detection.

Maybe a file /etc/exportfinger is in order?  :-)

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