cgw@vaxb.acs.unt.edu (06/28/91)
here's a little blurb about `plan', which i posted this afternoon to alt.sources. please reply via email, if any replies are necessary. in case you're wondering exactly what plan does, well, here goes: plan creates a special file - a FIFO queue - called `.plan', and watches for any access of that file. because fingerd opens .plan to print any text there, the program gets activated. the only parameter to plan is a program to run when this happens. so, if you needed to get some information to a large group of unknown users, you could use plan to do it. you'd just create a program or script that gave the necessary information, and then whenever that account was fingered, it would run the program (or script). anyway, i've written a little program called `fingerer' that i like to run along with plan. when plan runs fingerer, fingerer first increases the # of times i've been fingered and then does a ps and greps for the string "finger" to see if it can find someone locally running finger on you. this has some drawbacks, however: if more than one person is running finger, it might not get the right one... this is increasingly likely on high-load systems. anyway, fingerer then picks off the userid of the person running finger, and logs that information to a file, along with the date & time. if it can't find someone running finger locally, it does a "netstat -n" to look for connections on port 79. it then snips out the IP address of that connection and logs it to a file. then, fingerer cats a file called `..plan' (since `.plan' is the FIFO). that way, you can still have a .plan file (of sorts). that's basically it. i've done some special-casing in the local-user part that checks for specific userids and does output specifically for that user. i'll be posting a simplified version of fingerer to alt.sources in a few days (once i get it ported from a brain-dead sequent/DYNIX to a sun..). plan, along with fingerer has MANY MANY possibilities... one that i've thought of, but haven't implemented yet, is to give fingerer a list of people to watch for, and specific information to send them. for instance, say you wanted everyone else in your office to know that you'd gone out for a 2 hour lunch, but wanted your boss to know that you were out going to the doctor (:-))... just tell fingerer that your boss should get THIS information, but everyone else get this OTHER information... anyway... that's it. until i post source for my fingerer, you can just have plan execute a finger or a who, or something, just for playing.. (this was also mailed to all the respondents) -cgw- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- christopher williams, `gilligan', `dude', cgw@vaxb.acs.unt.edu, +1 817 565 4161 lead programmer/operator, the university of north texas, home of the _VaxCave_! `help stamp out and abolish redundancy!' my other .sig is boring too.