Customizing FINGER

FINGER has a great many customizations you can do. This short document
is meant to give some idea of a few of them.
	All locations with site-specific selections are commented
and begin with the string "site-specific".

1. To select default fields for display, you edit FINGERCLD.CLD.
	You have to edit FINGER.FOR to change widths of individual
	display fields, however.
2. Most other edits are to FINGER.FOR
	The places are mostly marked with the comment "site specific".

Minimum_match_characters
	By defining this parameter, you set the fewest characters
	permitted in a wildcard match. If it's 0, then the %
	character will give a total user list, and short queries
	such as vowels can be used to obtain lists of users.
	If it is defined to be some larger number (e.g., 3)
	then when you request users and give that many characters
	of their names, Finger reports full account names. For
	shorter queries, Finger only tells if an account that is
	exactly the string given exists. Thus, if it's 3,

Finger A
	will say "no such account: A"

	whereas if it's 0, Finger would list all accounts whose
	usernames or account names contained the letter A.
	Edit Get_Username to change this.

Public directories:
	Finger can be set up to report only images in specific
	"public" directories (so if image names are sensitive, it
	won't report them unless they're in "open" directories
	like sys$system. You have to define which are public directories
	on your system and uncomment the code that checks them.

MAIL:
	Finger can report unread mail. There are selections that
	cause it to report or not report counts of unread messages.
	In addition you can have Finger report the From: field of
	either the most recent Mail message, or the From: fields
	of all unread mail messages. This should be tailored on a
	per site basis; some folks will feel that allowing anyone
	else to know who sent them mail is an invasion of privacy.
	On the other hand, it permits a sender to see whether the
	recipient has read HIS mail message yet. There's no code
	to let Finger discriminate based on who's doing the fingering
	at this point, though the network Finger command could have
	the /NOMAIL switch if desired. (VERY partial protection; a
	person could use the /MAIL switch over the net). This is in
	the Personal_Info subroutine.
	LATE ADDITION: Rand Hall has supplied some code which allows
	Finger to report unread mail dates which are from the fingerer
	user only. This is selected by setting the PARANOID variable
	to true. The effect is that, on your own node, you can see
	that someone has unread mail FROM you, and the total number
	of unread mail messages. Across DECnet, however, you can get
	no information even where you sent mail to the person you're
	fingering. All you see across DECnet is the unread mail count.
	The sources are currently set in this mode for no particularly
	good reason, though one could argue that names are easily forged
	across DECnet. Those selecting visibility of ALL mail messages
	should be aware that people on Internet mailing lists can get
	VERY long unread mail counts when they are away for a few days.


BYPASS
	Sometimes it's useful to be able to prevent escapes and
	other control characters from being displayed in other
	people's FINGER.PLN files. FINGER is built with a switch
	(/BYPASS) which allows display of these characters; the
	switch /NOBYPASS disables them. The default is set in
	FINGERCLD.CLD and as supplied it is set to /BYPASS.
		By changing this default, you can prevent display
	of such control characters. This can be essential on non
	DEC terminals at times, or useful where someone decides to
	turn on "organ mode" with VT100 escape sequences. Caution:
	where the default is changed, some folks just redefine the
	FINGER symbol to include the /BYPASS switch. Proper reaction
	to mischevious FINGER.PLN files should be deletion or edit
	by system managers and/or management action, not technical
	bandaids. The facility as supplied can be vital for sensitive
	nonDEC terminals, or as a diagnostic. The code can be edited
	to be omitted altogether or to be unconditionally selected
	if desired, however.

LAT Info

	If code that calls LAT_INFO is uncommented, then if your
	terminal name begins with LT, the code will be called.
	It will obtain the server name and port of an LT terminal
	(which corresponds to physical location) and return the
	information in the FINGER location field. This code has
	been debugged (runs on VMS 4.6 at least) and should be
	enabled if you have any LAT terminals.  You may want to
	do some further poking to reset the terminal name field,
	but this is left as a per-site exercise for the reader...
	Thanks to Rand Hall for getting the LAT code debugged.

Load Averaging device
	The load averaging device name can be selected as LAV0:
	or whatever else is appropriate. If you don't have the
	LAV driver, load averaging will not be displayed.

The USER_INFO routine can be modified on a site specific basis to change
	field widths and select what default information should be
	displayed.

The name of the FINGER.PLN file can be chosen on a per site basis. The
	current version will try both FINGER.PLN and PLAN. You can
	change these as you like. You may also choose to have Finger
	use privilege to open Finger.PLN but beware! If your users
	then use SET FILE/ENTER they can get finger to print any
	file on the disk to which they have E access to the directory.
	If they have no E access to any directory other than their
	own, this may be OK however. The problem is only for files in
	their login disk.

Terminal types PT are recognized as pseudo terminals. Also, terminals
	with names beginning in PX are treated as PC network terminals.
	This can be altered on a per site basis as needed.