From: patrick@casbs.stanford.edu (Patrick Goebel)
Subject: GNU finger 1.37 glitches
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Distribution: gnu
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 10:02:51 GMT

G'day GNU gurus,

Here are some minor glitches I have discovered while installing or
using GNU finger.  First my setup:

GNU finger version: 1.37
Server: Sun SPARCstation 330 running SunOS 4.1.1
Clients: two Sun SPARCstation 2's running SunOS 4.1.1
Compiler: gcc version 2.1
No arguments were given to configure

Glitches:

(1) `make server' fails with a complaint about the -O option to gcc
because the Makefile (generated by configure) at the top of the source
tree contains the lines:

server: $(AUXOBJS) $(EXECUTABLES)
        (cd $(SRC); $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS)  $(CC)="$(CC)" server)
                                       ^^^^^
        (cd targets; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) $(CC)="$(CC)" server)
                                       ^^^^^

which should instead read

server: $(AUXOBJS) $(EXECUTABLES)
        (cd $(SRC); $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS)  CC="$(CC)" server)
                                       ^^
        (cd targets; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) CC="$(CC)" server)
                                       ^^
I believe this can be fixed in the file Makefie.in.

(2) Once GNU finger is installed and the daemon is set running,
finger'ing any user who has not logged in since the new finger was
setup yields, for example:

% finger lisa

Lisa Staton (lisa) has never logged on. For more information,
try `finger --info lisa@casbs' or `finger -l lisa@casbs'

But note that using the -l option we get:

% finger -l lisa

Lisa Staton (lisa)
Home: /home/staff/lisa
Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
No mail.
Last login on ttyp8 from delphi.Stanford., on Thu Nov 19 15:44:16 1992

which contradicts the first output.

I realize that such inconsistencies will disappear as the GNU finger
database is built up but it would be nice if the database could be
initialized from /var/adm/lastlog (or whatever) at the time of
installation.

(3) `finger -l .local@host' doesn't work properly.  For example
machine `quercus' is a finger client of server `casbs'.  Here's what
happens:

casbs% finger -l .local@quercus
[quercus.Stanford.EDU]
  User     Real Name         What    Idle  TTY  Host      Console Location
action   Lynn or Patrick             0:44   pc casbs    (casbs.Stanford.E)
carol    Carol Baxter                8:18   p8 casbs    (ast-carol.Stanfo)
carol    Carol Baxter                3:01   p4 casbs    (ast-carol.Stanfo)
frank    Robert Frank                1:45   q3 casbs    (casbs.Stanford.E)
frank    Robert Frank                1:45   p3 casbs    (tip-casbs.Stanfo)
patrick  Patrick Goebel                     co casbs    
richard  Richard Yarborough          0:05   q6 casbs    (richard-15.Stanf)
ross     Dorothy Ross                6:44   q4 casbs    (tip-casbs.Stanfo)
sears    David Sears                        q0 casbs    (tip-casbs.Stanfo)
watkins  Susan Cotts Watkin         21:43   p2 casbs    (tip-casbs.Stanfo)
watkins  Susan Cotts Watkin         21:43   pa casbs    (casbs.Stanford.E)
weber    Elke Weber                  0:59   p1 casbs    (weber-32.Stanfor)

whereas, without the -l we get the correct output which is:

casbs% finger .local@quercus
[quercus.Stanford.EDU]
  User     Real Name         What    Idle  TTY  Host      Console Location
action   Lynn or Patrick             2:49   p2 quercus  (quercus.Stanford)
lynn     Lynn Gale                   0:47   co quercus  

You may ask, why would someone want to use -l with .local anyway and
the answer is that I have `finger' aliased to `finger -l' so that
users doing a `finger user@host' will see the .plan  or .project file
by default (as they are used to when using /usr/ucb/finger).

(4) `finger -l .free' generates some weird behavior.  First of all,
the command yields the output:

% finger -l .free
There is no user named .free here; check your spelling. Feel free
to contact postmaster@casbs for further...etc

But in addition, a mail message is sent to Postmaster that looks like
this:

From:    MAILER-DAEMON (Mail Delivery Subsystem)
Subject: Returned mail: Unable to deliver mail
To:      Postmaster
Date:    Thu, 07 Jan 93 17:32:30 PST

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
<<< EXPN .free
550 .free... User unknown
421 casbs.Stanford.EDU Lost input channel to casbs.Stanford.EDU

  ----- No message was collected -----

As in (3) this situation arises because `finger' is aliased to `finger
-l'.

(5) When fingering our site from another site using /usr/ucb/finger
(or GNU finger), the user only sees the short form of the output by
default; i.e.  it is necessary to use the -l option to see the
contents of the .plan or .project file.  The only problem I have with
this is that the default behavior of one /usr/ucb/finger talking to
another /usr/ucb/finger is to display .plan or .project even without
the -l option.  Consequently, when we switched over to GNU finger at
our site, all of a sudden people from the outside stopped seeing our
.plan and .project files.  (Of course, they only need use the -l
option, but sometimes this is way more than the average user
knows...).

Thanks for a great product.  I hope this feedback helps.

Cheers,
patrick
--
Patrick Goebel                    E-MAIL: patrick@casbs.Stanford.EDU
Network Administrator             VOICE:  (415) 321-2052
CASBS, 202 Junipero Serra Blvd.   FAX:    (415) 321-1192
Stanford, CA 94305                BEEPER: Temporarily Out of Order...

Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug