DNS: A Replacement for Finger

34 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by Bender

26 Comments

dd8601fn

6 hours ago

Fun. But a status needs to be updated semi-frequently and my dns service only offers api mgmt for bigger customers.

I guess I could delegate a zone to another provider who does.

Bender

5 hours ago

I guess I could delegate a zone to another provider who does.

That's a good idea. One could delegate to a stand alone instance for instant updates.

khalidsaidi

2 hours ago

instant at the authoritative server, but anyone querying through a recursive resolver could still get the old status until the ttl expires. what ttl would you use for this?

Bender

an hour ago

what ttl would you use for this?

Something low like 60 to 90 seconds should be fine unless they are an influencer, then we could monitor their live stream.

MiiMe19

2 hours ago

Page does not seem to work with Firefox on Linux, or maybe its just down.

Bender

2 hours ago

I too am using Firefox on Linux. Are you by chance using a VPN hosted in AWS? I normally let VPS through but AWS has some special abusers that got my attention. I moved that out of the way for now. Thus far 2795 real people and 8888 bots. I have some room for improvement on false positives but we are getting there.

parallax_error

3 hours ago

Seems like I get served gibberish bytes in the response body when visiting this site! I promise I’m not a bot :(

Bender

2 hours ago

Old versions of Safari could get that. I am being an opinionated ass and practicing hostile security paternalism because the safety and bot-filtering benefits outweigh the cost of supporting old clients. I do even stranger things.

adzm

7 hours ago

> many large TXT records can be abused for DDoS purposes. dig -t txt ebay.com for a DDoS Example used today

What does this mean, I see a bunch in the lookup but I don't understand the ddos part

Bender

7 hours ago

If a site has a large set of TXT records, they can be used by clients that spoof packets to request large volumes of answers by DNS servers. This is called an amplification attack. Many tiny spoofed requests in, many large answers out.

warkdarrior

4 hours ago

That's just the braindeqd design of DNS, responding to arbitrary UDP packets without authenticating the IP address of the sender.

Bender

4 hours ago

Indeed. For what it's worth the spoofing aspect got better for a while then plateaued. [1] bcp84 / bcp38 adoption has pretty much stalled out. No idea what to do with the remaining ISP's.

[1] - https://spoofer.caida.org/summary.php

cowlevel

8 hours ago

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

And why do we want finger to exist?

Bender

8 hours ago

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

Its just a private fork of an open source anonymous image board. I had a static blog for it but I got bored and moved all my blog posts to the image board. Probably a rather unorthodox experiment. The reply button is at the bottom right. I might change that.

And why do we want finger to exist?

There were discussions in the past about the finger service and how hardly anyone runs it any more and even less likely to be found on the open internet. DNS seemed like a good replacement for it to me as more and more people have domains now and authoritative DNS servers are likely to be more secure and distributed I think. Maybe one day specific groups of people do something like this in place of sites like X. half kidding

Now instead of having a special purpose client, one need only query a DNS record. In this case I use "dig" as the example but there are other DNS tools people might prefer to use.

GalaxyNova

7 hours ago

Because it allows for an easy interface to see what someone else is up to without needing to load a JS-heavy page.

warkdarrior

7 hours ago

Assuming you have this finger app installed. My Android store does not seem to have one, for example.

spauldo

6 hours ago

Finger is a protocol. It's older than IP.

You can read about it in RFC 742.

assimpleaspossi

6 hours ago

Unix, Linux and BSD have finger built in.

drivers99

6 hours ago

Just found out macOS has it too. Created a .plan file and used finger on my user name and it showed the plan. There's no fingerd or anything listening on the port though, but it worked locally. Neat.

Bender

7 hours ago

It's just a shell function so in this case if one had a terminal app that has a shell one could add the function. No idea how feasible that is on a phone.

cowlevel

7 hours ago

A terminal emulator is more heavy than a dedicated app is

Bender

7 hours ago

I will leave writing an app to someone else. I've watched others go through all the challenges of getting into app stores and it's just not for me.

cowlevel

7 hours ago

Fortunately some phones allow you to install apps, not just get them through the overpriced shit store.

anthk

5 hours ago

If it has a shell and telnet/nc it has finger:

echo user | nc example.com 79

Lynx works too over gopher:

lynx gopher://graph.no:79/0/london