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FINGER PORTAL TO WORDPRESS BLOG |
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2022-11-17 |
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FINGER PRIMER |
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The finger protocol, first standardised way back in 1977, is a lightweight |
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directory system for querying resources on a local or remote shared system. |
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Despite barely being used today, it's so well-established that virtually every |
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modern desktop operating system - Windows, MacOS, Linux etc. - comes with a |
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copy of finger, giving it a similar ubiquity to web browsers! (If you haven't |
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yet, give it a go.) |
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If you were using a shared UNIX-like system in the 1970s through 1990s, you |
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might run finger to see who else was logged on at the same time as you, finger |
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chris to get more information about Chris, or finger alice@example.net to look |
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up the details of Alice on the server example.net. Its ability to transcend |
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the boundaries of different systems meant that it was, after a fashion, an |
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example of an early decentralised social network! |
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I first actively used finger when I was a student at Aberystwyth University. |
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The shared central computers osfa and osfb supported it in what was a pretty |
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typical way: users could add a .plan and/or .project file to their home |
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directory and the contents of these would be output to anybody using finger to |
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look up that user, along with other information like what department they |
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belonged to. I'm simulating from memory so this won't be remotely accurate, |
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but broadly speaking it looked a little like this - |
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$ finger dlq9@aber.ac.uk |
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Login: dlq9 Name: Dan Q |
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Directory: /users/9/d/dlq9 Department: Computer Science |
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Project: |
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Working on my BEng Software Engineering. |
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Plan: |
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_______ |
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---' ____)____ |
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______) Finger me! |
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_____) |
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(____) |
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---.__(___) |
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It's not just about a directory of people, though: you could finger printers |
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to see what their queues were like, finger a time server to ask what time it |
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was, finger a vending machine to see what drinks it had available... even |
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finger for a weather forecast where you are (this one still works as shown |
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below; try it for your own location!) - |
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$ finger oxford@graph.no |
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-= Meteogram for Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom =- |
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'C Rain (mm) |
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12 |
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11 |
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10 ^^^=--=-- |
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9^^^ === |
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8 ^^^=== ====== ^^^ |
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7 ====== ===============^^^ =-- |
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6 =--=----- |
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5 |
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4 |
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3 | | | | | | | 1 mm |
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 18/11 02 03 04 05 06 07_08_09_10_11_12_13_14 Hour |
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W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W Wind dir. |
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6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 6 6 5 5 4 4 4 4 5 6 6 5 5 Wind(m/s) |
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Legend left axis: - Sunny ^ Scattered = Clouded =V= Thunder # Fog |
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Legend right axis: | Rain ! Sleet * Snow |
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If you'd just like to play with finger, then finger.farm is a great starting |
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point. They provide free finger hosting and they're easy to use (try finger |
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dan@finger.farm to find me!). But I had something bigger in mind... |
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FINGERING WORDPRESS |
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What if you could finger my blog. I.e. if you ran finger blog@danq.me you'd |
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see a summary of some of my recent posts, along with additional addresses you |
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could finger to read the full content of each. This could be the world's first |
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finger-to-WordPress gateway; y'know, for if you thought the world needed such |
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a thing. Here's how I did it: |
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* Installed efingerd; I'm using the Debian binaries. |
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* Opened a hole in the firewall on port 79 so the outside world could access |
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it (ufw allow 1965; utf reload). |
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* The default configuration for efingerd acts like a "typical" finger server, |
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but it's highly programmable to make it "smarter". I: |
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Blanked /etc/efingerd/list to prevent any output from "listing" the |
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server (finger @danq.me). |
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Replaced the contents of /etc/efingerd/list and |
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/etc/efingerd/nouser(which are run when a request matches, or doesn't match, a |
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user account name) with a call to my script: |
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/usr/local/bin/finger-to-wordpress "$3". $3 holds the username that was |
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requested, so we can act on it. |
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Created /usr/local/bin/finger-to-wordpress - a Ruby program that either |
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(a) lists a selection of posts or (b) returns a specific post (stripping the |
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HTML tags) |
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Screenshot showing finger blog@danq.me |
image/png |
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In future, I might use some extra tags or metadata to enhance finger-friendly |
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WordPress posts. The infrastructure's in place already (I already have tags |
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that I use to make certain kinds of content available only via certain media - |
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shh!). You might rightly as what the point is of this entire enterprise, of |
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course, and you'd be well within your rights to ask such a question. But I |
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think the best answer available is "because Dan". |
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Screenshot showing finger wp-finger@danq.me |
image/png |
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If you want to see my blog in a whole new way, give it a go: run finger |
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blog@danq.me on your computer and follow the instructions. |
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LINKS |
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RFC742: NAME/FINGER (https://www.rfc-editor.org) |
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ComputerHope's guide to the finger command (https://www.computerhope.com) |
text/html |
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Aberystwyth University (https://www.aber.ac.uk) |
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Story of the Coke Vending Machine that answered to Finger. (https://www.cs.cmu.edu) |
text/plain |
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Finger.farm (https://finger.farm) |
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WordPress (https://wordpress.org) |
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efingerd repository from Debian (https://sources.debian.org) |
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Source code of my program that routes efingerd requests to WordPress (https://gist.github.com) |
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