NAME TRACER

In follow-up to last month’s discussion of inetd-based server processes [1], this month’s issue examines the Ident protocol as an example of the possibilities and pitfalls of Unix-based servers. The very simple Ident protocol serves the purpose of assigning a user name on a client machine to a TCP connection. FTP, IRC, and SMTP often rely on Ident. When an FTP connection is established (and depending on the server configuration), some FTP servers ask the client to identify the local user who opened the connection. Figure 1 depicts this process.