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I've revised this in my new post due to issues with running under systemd
Not a lot of folks use the finger command or protocol these days; however, I've been delving into the #smallweb / smolweb (i.e., the Gemini Protocol) for the past year and noticed a few people have revived this ancient protocol for status updates. I figured I'd give it a shot, and I thought it would be simple, but the lack of guidance really hindered me for a bit.
If you're wondering, efingerd / fingerd (the original) simply enables people outside of your own linux machine to use the finger command, just remotely.
Finger / efingerd is not installed on Ubuntu 22.10 by default so you have to install it:
$ sudo apt-get install finger $ sudo apt-get install efingerd
This post only goes over efingerd, but if you want to see what other finger daemons are available:
$ apt search fingerd
This is the part I was stuck on – since the programs are so old, they simply state that you have to start them using inetd. Knowing that inetd has pretty much been replaced by systemd everywhere, I needed to figure out how to get this running on systemd. Not being a system admin, I was looking for the easy button, but DDG searching brought no solutions, so into the systemd intro blogs I went and made one of my own.
I used this site as a guide:
Systemd Services on linuxhandbook.com
And created the following service, which has to be in the “system” folder since efingerd needs to run as root (it's located in /sbin/)
/etc/systemd/system/efingerd.service
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[Unit] Description=efingerd service After=network.target [Service] Type=simple StandardOutput=syslog StandardError=syslog ExecStart=/sbin/efingerd Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
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$ sudo systemctl efingerd start
$ sudo journalctl -f -u efingerd
make all files in /etc/efingerd executeable
sudo chmod +x /etc/efingerd/
edit them - there are a few test commands in there... check out the manpage for what they do
try to finger your server:
finger @<your server>
This should respond with whatever /etc/efingerd/list does
Create an ~/.efingerd file and make it executeable
I simply put in:
#! /bin/sh echo "gritty"
and then:
finger gritty@smallweb.space
Note: if no .efingerd file exits, then /etc/efingerd/luser executes instead
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2023-01-20
Tags: finger, fingerd, efingerd 100daystooffload
Gritty
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gritty@smallweb.space