SUMMARY: away from home .plans

From: Araya Pamonprawat - PHST (phabm@mahidol.ac.th)
Date: Wed Jan 03 1996 - 21:57:42 CST


 
Apparently no known finger daemons refer to a shell variable called PLAN,
so I wonder where I got that idea from! Also my understanding of file
permissions was confused: permissions aren't 'recursive' to down-tree
files, so read permission isn't needed on a users home directory (only
execute permission) for others to be able to access their .plan. Of
course .plan needs read permission for others set.

Suggestions included:

        install a better finger daemon eg pfingerd, gnu's fingerd,
        or one of two different sfingerd programs
        
        upgrade from Solaris 2.2 to 2.4 or 2.5

        make links from users .plan files to a non-dot file

        configure the finger daemon to look in a file other than .plan

Action I will take:

        Download and install a more secure finger daemon

        #chmod go+x /home/*
        
        for each user, create a link from their .plan file to a
        file called "plan". (This will avoid having to confuse my
        unsophisticated users with dot files and -a options.)

Thank you for helping. I appreciate your advice.

        Dave McFerren
        Jim Merit
        Jochen Bern
        Juergen Peus
        Kevin Sheehan
        Matus Uhlar
        Vibhavasu Vuppala

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Original Post:

I run a Solaris 2.2 machine with all recommended patches installed.
I want to enable my users to put info about
themselves into a ".plan" file for other users to see using finger.
However my users are not very sophisticated, so I don't want to set read
and execute permissions for others on their home directories, and I don't
want their ".plan" file to be a hidden file.

        I tried creating a directory /home/plans with a world readable
file for each user having the same name as their user name, ie
/home/plans/username and in /etc/profile putting the instruction
PLAN=/home/plans/$LOGNAME; export PLAN
(My users use ksh)
This didn't work. Can you show me how to do it? I will summarise.



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