Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~
in.mfingerd is a replacement finger daemon which allows users to be checked
for on a network of machines, without the overheads that running GNU finger
entails.  It also supports some of the special usernames used by some other
finger daemons - see the man page for more details.

Requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tested on a network of machines running RedHat Linux 4.1 (kernel 2.0.27). I
give no guarantee that it will work properly on any other setup, the output
will be mangled if your finger program gives out information in a different
format, for example.

Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~
1) By default, the configuration files go in /usr/local/etc, so if you want
   to change this, then edit the CONFIG_DIR define in in.mfingerd.c and the
   ETCDIR variable (and possibly others) in the Makefile.

2) Edit mfingerd.conf, mfingerd.help and mfingerd.site. The .site and .help
   files are plain text which is output when special usernames are fingered
   and the format of the .conf file is explained within the file itself.

3) Now try `make'. If this fails, try hacking the source...

4) If you're quite happy for everything to go in the deafult places:
   /usr/local/sbin, /usr/local/man/man8, /usr/local/etc
   Then do `make install', otherwise edit the Makefile first.

5) Test. `echo <username> | in.mfingerd' is as good a way as any.
   Most important is `.mfinger' - if the output of this is mangled, then it
   means that your finger program is different from mine - you have to edit
   the code by hand to fix this, I'm afraid.

6) Change a line in /etc/inetd.conf so that in.mfingerd is called. eg:
finger stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/in.mfingerd
   If this machine doesn't know about all the usernames on your system (if,
   for example, it's a firewall which only the sysadmins can use), then you
   can append the hostname of another machine to which such requests can be
   sent.

7) Do `killall -HUP inetd' or whatever to restart inetd.

8) Repeat above process on all the machines you specified in mfingerd.conf.

9) Enjoy!

And Finally
~~~~~~~~~~~
This program was originally a shell script (with rather less functionality)
and then a perl script before I finally got around to translating it into C
and adding all the features. If you have any comments/problems/suggestions,
then feel free to contact me (although if you're trying to install this you
are probably at least as clueful as I am ;-) and I can make a vague attempt
to do something.

in.mfingerd is Copyright (C) 1997 Mark Rigby-Jones
mrj@ox.compsoc.org.uk <*> http://www.ox.compsoc.org.uk/~mrj/
