On 12 Apr 1999, Mike Carter wrote:
> How can you set what will be returned if somebody fingered my e-mail
> address? How does all this work?
It's not actually your email address that's used, although the two will
often be the same. Finger traditionally returns the contents of the .plan
or .project file in the user's home directory on whichever machine is
being fingered. In the previous example, finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] returns
the .project and .plan files from owagner's home directory on vapor.com
(which also happens to be www.active-net.co.uk, useless trivia fans).
finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] may get you something, but is more
likely to respond with a pithy message about unauthorised access - for
various reasons, I don't let people outside the college see whether I'm
online or not :) Or, if you feel a burning desire to know when I last got
mail, finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] (the university's main mail server).
Whether or not this can be done with your ISP account depends on your ISP.
Fingering some users at their mail server may respond with something.
You're unlikely to be able to change this, but if you do want to try
getting in touch with your ISP.
Completely unrelated, has anyone else played with Basilisk II yet? I
finally got it compiled on my Linux machine after forcing it to use the
generic cpu emulation rather than the optimised one, and it certainly
seems usably fast. Sigh. There's another chunk of my life signed away...
--
Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
