[HECnet] Re: Finger survey

On 2024-09-14 14:49, Dan Cross wrote: The aaareadme.txt file there says: | DECUS FINGER DIFFERENCES | ======================== | This is a list of things I can think of which differ. | | /HELP to the server is the only documentation. | This is a munged copy of the DECUS Finger help file. | I haven't given documentation any serious consideration yet. | | This is a clusterwide finger (/CLUSTER is default). | | New mail message headers are never listed (I haven't yet figured | out how to match addresses so it only displays messages from the | person doing the Finger). | | There is no Finger database. Names are read from the SYSUAF | owner field. The entire SYSUAF is read at startup, and updated | as needed for new accounts. There is not presently an easy way | to disable printing the owner name. | | Added fields for account and nodename. | | No support for /SYSTEM, /IDLETIME, /TTTYPE, or /SWAPPED. | | /SORT only supports account, CPU time, Login time, and Username | (Username is the default). | | Differs a bit in what an interactive process is. | | Only supports one filename for finger plan (default FINGER.PLN). | Also prints a project line (FINGER.PROJECT). | | The format of the process listing (which fields can be displayed, | which columns, and how wide the fields are) can be easily configured | at assembly time. | | No support for Jnet, or TCP other then UCX/Multinet, at this time. | | The server will not forward Finger requests. Commands like | Finger @watsun@cunixc are not valid. So it seems that there was some contributions from one to the other (be- fore my maintainership). The PSU one is in Macro-32. That's the sign of someone who REALLY likes Macro-32. DEC folks would probably have used Bliss-32. The Columbia one (which turned into DECUS Finger) is written almost entirely in Fortran, probably because Fortran was the only sensible cross-architecture language of the era (while I'm pretty sure one could write a Finger implementation in COBOL or RPG II, I don't envy the life of anyone who would try it 8-). I'm not sure what the state of cluster support is in DECUS Finger - by the time I released 5.1.35 I only had a single Alpha node. I'll have to see how it is on a cluster and add that support if not present for V52.2.