                             pidentd

                      (Peter's Ident Daemon)


This program is released into the public domain and can be used by
anyone who wants to. Vendors may include it into their distributions
if they want to without any restrictions. (Although it would be nice
to be notified by email if someone decides to do that, and/or a note
somewhere about who wrote this program. Like in the man-page or so...)

This is a program that implements the RFC931 identification server. It
was very much inspired by Dan Bernstein's original 'authd' (but unlike
that program doesn't use 'netstat' to get some of the information) It
uses the kernel information directly.  (And is due to that fact a lot
faster). Dan has now written another version of the 'authd' daemons that
uses his 'kstuff' to read the kernel information. Unlike that daemon,
this will use only normally available kernel access functions (and is due
to that more limited in the different machines it support). Please note
that this daemons used to be called pauthd but has changed name to better
reflect what it does (and to conform to the new RFC).

This daemon (or an earlier version, but only minor changes has been made so
it should work anyhow) has been tested on the following machines/OS:

  Sequent Balance 8000 - Dynix 2.1.1
  Sequent Balance      - Dynix 3.0.4
  Sequent Symmetry     - Dynix 3.0.12
  Sun 2/50	       - SunOS 4.0.3
  Sun 2/120	       - SunOS 4.0.3
  Sun 3/50             - SunOS 4.1.1
  Sun 3/80	       - SunOS 4.1.1
  Sun 4/40 (SLC)       - SunOS 4.1.1B
  Sun 4/380	       - SunOS 4.1.1
  HP 9000/300          - HP-UX 7.0
  HP 9000/710	       - HP-UX 8.07
  HP 9000/720          - HP-UX 8.05
  HP 9000/835 	       - HP-UX 8.0
  HP 9000/375          - HP-UX 8.0
  MIPS		       - RISC/OS 4.52
  DEC		       - Ultrix 4.2

Please let me know if you find any bugs, or have ported it to other
machines (and care to share the changes with me and the world!).

See the manual page for information about the various command line
options that are available.

NOTE: One should NOT use the -d option when using it for normal use!

If you intend to create or modify daemons to use the ident protocol
you should fetch Dan's authd-package since it includes a C-library
with interface functions that makes it very easy to use. A version of
that library with a few bug fixes applied are available from 
'ftp.lysator.liu.se' in the directory 'lib/ident'.

There is a mailing list for users of the Ident/RFC931 protocol called
'rfc931-users@kramden.acf.nyu.edu' that you may want to consider joining.
Send mail to the address 'rfc931-users-request@kramden.acf.nyu.edu' to
join the list.

I'm grateful for success/failure stories about installing/compiling this
daemon...

/Peter Eriksson (pen@lysator.liu.se)
