Unix Ident

Revision as of 21:21, 20 October 2007

On unix systems, Ident works somewhat differently than on Windows or the Mac. Ident on unix is a system utility which needs to be installed by the system administrator (or other user with ROOT access). It only needs to be installed once regardless of how many users are using the system and requires no setup - it automatically configures itself.

Most unix distributions include an ident server, if you do not have one then you should be able to find a suitable version on the net without much trouble. Be sure to download only from trusted sites and check the package for tampering carefully before installing.

PIDENTD 3.0.10 : (RPM Packages)

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-6.2/i386/RedHat/SRPMS/SRPMS/pidentd-3.0.10-5.src.rpm

FakeIdentd 1.1 : (RPM Packages)

For the more paranoid sysadmins who'd rather not reveal genuine login ID's, FakeIdentd will provide an Ident response which you can configure manually, preventing anyone discovering the real ID of the users. NOTE - this still needs ROOT priviliges to install.

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/libc6/SRPMS/fakeidentd-1.1-1.src.rpm

If you are unable to use RPM packaging, the source (tar.gz format) for pidentd can be found here :

ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/ident/servers/

You will need to compile this yourself for your system. We recommend those who are able to use the RPM packages do so.

WARNING - We cannot provide ANY support for these utilites. You are advised to make full backups
of all important files prior to installation. Users of multi-user systems will need to contact
their sysadmin to have these utilites installed. 

For security reasons, you will be unable to connect to ChatX as ROOT. Create a seperate user
account and use that to IRC.