A question about finger

[Ben Cox]

jfsenior at unix1.tcd.ie (Semolina Pilchard) writes:

>I was just wondering why it is that when I chmod my .plan to 600, other people
>can still read it by fingering me, finger isn't setuid or anything.. and
>the source doesn't seem to have any strange stuff in it.

At our site, others can't finger someone whose .plan is mode 600.  The
reason is that /etc/inetd.conf (on 4.3 systems) determines who fingerd
is run as.  On our system, it's "nobody".  On other systems, it might
be "root".  (On non-4.3 systems, fingerd probably runs all the time,
as root.)

--
Ben Cox
bc at uxa.cso.uiuc.edu