Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 07:46:58 -0800 From: Matthew Hunt <mph@pobox.com> To: phoenix@calldei.com Cc: GReg Sutter <gsutter@pobox.com>, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proposal: Ignore .nofinger for root Message-ID: <19990210074658.A10003@wopr.caltech.edu> In-Reply-To: <19990210082606.B58482@holly.dyndns.org>; from Chris Costello on Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 08:26:06AM -0600 References: <19990209200259.A98301@wopr.caltech.edu> <19990210082606.B58482@holly.dyndns.org>
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On Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 08:26:06AM -0600, Chris Costello wrote: > Yes. Why? Well, I thought the rationale was trivial: To provide accurate information to the superuser. On further reflection, though, that the patch is poor design, although the argument is more subtle than your argument of "why?" or Greg Lehey's argument that using finger on a local system is somehow perverse. I thought a good argument for the patch goes something like this: The superuser has access to all of the information provided by finger on a local system anyhow, so allowing ~/.nofinger only serves to mislead him or make it less convenient for him to get to the information he wants. However, that statement is true for all local users, not just the superuser. Any user on the system who wanted to get around the "protection" of ~/.nofinger could just build a new "finger" with the hide() check removed. The conclusion, therefore, is that if a change were to be made, it should be that finger(1) ignores ~/.nofinger for all local users. The effects of such a change are more far-reaching than I feel appropriate, so I withdraw the proposal. I suppose that root has to use a mixture of w and something like chpass or pw if he wants accurate information. Something still doesn't seem right to me about finger lying to the superuser by saying that a real user doesn't even exist... -- Matthew Hunt <mph@pobox.com> * Science rules. http://www.pobox.com/~mph/pgp.key for PGP public key 0x67203349. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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