🚀 go-pugleaf

ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (George Michaelson) writes:
>I see an increasing amount of stuff being done using finger as a
>method of distributed information-getting.
>...  I would prefer to see an explicit 'distributed information' protocol 
>to replace finger being used for:
>	email address lookup ...
>leaving finger alone to be used for what it was designed for.

I certainly agree that 'netfind', which does massive
numbers of 'finger's whenever anybody uses it, is a bad idea.

But what about 'Horton'?  It fingers all the participating machines in
one's own domain hourly to update an e-mail address database,
which users then access via whois.
Since all the finger requests it generates are between two sites inside 
your own domain, they should be easy to distinguish as benign.
Do you consider this a 'bad' use of finger?

It would be impractical to make horton use something other than finger,
since it's whole reason for being is that it makes use of a universally 
available protocol for gathering information & thus requires no
active cooperation from the participating (but anarchic) sites.

- Dan Kegel (dank@blacks.jpl.nasa.gov)