why doesn't remote finger work?

[Brian A. Kell]

I've been trying to get our PI (4D/25TG) to respond to remote "finger"
requests, but it doesn't work.  This has never worked on our PI in the
year or so since we've gotten it, through upgrades from 3.2 to 3.3.1.

When someone fingers our machine (say with "finger @isadora"), it
first appears as if a connection is established (the
"[isadora.albany.edu]" line is printed to the requestor's screen), but
then the process immediately terminates.  If one tries to connect
directly to the finger service (using "telnet isadora 79") a
connection is made and then immediately closed.

Apparently, the finger daemon isn't running.  Should it be?  When I
try to start it up manually (by typing "fingerd" as root), the
following message appears in the SYSLOG:

	fingerd[4920]: getpeername: Socket operation on non-socket

Apparently this problem happens on other PI's, too, since the 3 or 4
other PI's that I know of on the network (at other sites) all are
equally non-responsive to finger requests.

What can I do to get finger to work?  What must I do to get it to
start up automatically on reboot?

Thanks is advance.  You can e-mail or post; I will summarize e-mails
if there's sufficient traffic.

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Brian Kell     SUNY/Albany Departments of Computer Science and Biology
brian at isadora.albany.edu                        BK7295 at ALBNYVMS.BITNET
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