Re: Backwards Message Hack

Article: 7424 of alt.hackers
From: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Backwards Message Hack
Date: 19 Feb 1995 15:34:32 -0600
Organization: The Grays
Lines: 47
Approved: Pan-Galactic Usenet Kabal [tm]
Message-ID: 3i8dh8$216s@whale.st.usm.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: whale.st.usm.edu
Keywords: slimy lawyers....
Status: RO

In article <3i147u$prq@blackice.winternet.com>,
Peter Seebach <seebs@solutions.solon.com> wrote:

]>>1. logs all finger requests, with who was fingered, and from where

>Hmph.  This seems silly.

It _is_ silly. It's a silly daemon. An imp, if you will.

]>>2. returns a snotty message if the request is a "finger
@mysitename"
>
>That's silly; finger @foo.bar.baz is the best way to see if any of your
>friends at <x> are around.

Yeah...actually, it's a reaction to paranoid admins here and at
mmy .mil site who shut down in.fingerd to keep skumbags from getting
userlists. Overkill, IMHO.
At least my way,, you can explicitly finger a given user.

]>>3. returns a REALLY snotty message if it's "finger
Root@mysitename"

>What, you never noticed that super-users have the funniest plans?

True. Geez, Pete I _said_ it was pathetic! The root part was
an attempt at humor. I'll keep my day job.

]>>5. does a "finger@the.site.fingering-me", logs that
info, AND
]>>   sends it back to the fingerer.
>
>This sounds incredibly dangerous.  Finger-loops, and anyway, what makes
>you think you can get through a smart firewall?

Right again. (Isn't Pete a pain when he's right? ;) ) I'll drop this
part in the production version.

Actually, the whole thing was an exercise in Perl. Eventually, I want to
make it more configurable, lose the special behavior for fingering root,
disallow pass-through fingering (which is stupid in the first place), and
make a few other changes, as well.
>
obPeteWillMakeFunOfThis,TooHackinProgress:
On a WWW site where normal users can't do CGI, working
on a way to use named pipes to run programs from my
Web pages. If I could get a few hours without interruption....

--

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