IcculusFinger

IcculusFinger is a flexible finger daemon. It has a markup language that allows for formatted text that displays properly over both a standard finger client and as HTML for the web. It allows users to break their planfiles up into separately-requested sections. It allows for extra parameters to be passed with the finger request. It can archive plans to a MySQL database, so older revisions ("back issues") can be made available. It is generally more secure than standard Unix finger servers for several reasons. The entire system, from the web interface to the daemon itself and the .plan archiver, are highly configurable for the sysadmin, the .plan author, and the .plan audience.

IcculusFinger allows you to use a basic markup language in your .plan files, that is formatted as HTML over the web, and formatted as plain text for regular finger client requests. Please see this doc for info on what tags exist.

Here is an example of IcculusFinger in use.

To use IcculusFinger, you'll need:

• Perl.
• Presumably a Unix system, such as BSD, Solaris, or Linux. This may or may not work on some flavors of Windows or MacOS X.
• cgi-bin support in your webserver, if you want to use the web interface, but this is optional. You can just answer regular finger requests on port 79, if that's all you need.

IcculusFinger is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

• Here are the latest officially released source.
• If you are interested in maintaining packages for various distributions (.RPM, .DEB, FreeBSD Ports, etc), please drop me a line.

Downloading from SVN:

IcculusFinger's source code may be downloaded using SVN, or "Subversion". SVN allows you to get up-to-the-minute fixes and enhancements; as a developer works on a source tree, you can use SVN to mirror that source tree instead of waiting for an official release.

SVN is designed from a user standpoint to closely resemble CVS, so common commands like "svn update" and "svn diff" from within the checkout directory should behave as you expect, if you are already familiar with CVS. For any more details than this, please look at the SVN Website.

To download IcculusFinger via SVN:

svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/IcculusFinger/trunk IcculusFinger

Here is the web interface to IcculusFinger's Subversion repository.

Page maintained by Ryan C. Gordon