On Mon, 5 Feb 1996 15:28:12 -0400 Chris Bartram said:
> In <[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
>writes:
>
>> Has anyone out there run into this client/server gotcha?  And, if so, how
>> did you work around it?
>
>Off-the-top-of-my-head, how about something simple like a "finger" client on
>the PCs that gets auto-launched when the users go into windows (or whatever)
>that fingers "uptime@<serverhostname>". The .plan file can announce your hosts
>schedule.
>
>Free finger clients for windows (winsock) and other platforms abound. Un*x
>systems have the servers bundled with them, and although I haven't looked for
>a free 3000-based finger server, if there's not one already, it's a pretty
>easy server to write up [I know- it only took me a couple hours to write one
>from scratch for our NetMail system].
 
And Bob Walker contributed one, http://opus.admin.utc.edu/hp/fingerd.c, which
is based on a NetMail database but has the full skeleton you can use to reply
to requests however you wish (we have a generic one that returns a :showjob
output of userid.acct, such as finger [log in to unmask])
 
Don't bother trying to port a BSD finger daemon, all they do is exec() the
shell's finger command (unless you have a smart local finger, the BSD variety
looks for non-existant things in Posix-land, like /etc/utmp, /etc/passwd and
so forth).
 
Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>