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From: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Efficient fingerd?
Date: 25 Jan 1994 18:51:38 GMT
Organization: Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <2i3pnq$d3h@scratchy.reed.edu>
Reply-To: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
NNTP-Posting-Host: reed.edu
We seem to be receiving lots and lots of finger requests at our site
now, enough that it looks like it might be impairing our system
performance. (reed.edu is also our main CPU and NFS server - small
school, you know.)
Our passwd setup is also pretty monstrous - 2000 entries over yp. If
my guess is right every time we're fingered a new fingerd is reading
that entire file over yp. I know it's slow when ps has to do it, so I
suspect fingerd is no better.
Has someone written a more efficient fingerd? Ideally, a persistent
daemon that has read in the password file and hashed it out, then just
forks off children to answer individual requests? (no more inetd)
I know there's GNU finger, but I've had some bad experiences with it
in the past. Last time I checked, "finger minar@reed.edu" on a GNU
fingerd wouldn't even find me - it wasn't searching real names. Does
GNU finger work for people? Is it efficient?
E-mail answers are preferred. Thanks!
__
nelson@reed.edu \/ Death needs time for what it kills to grow in