On Wed, 19 May 1999, Erik E. Fair wrote:

: Speaking as a security-guy, I don't think we should enable identd by
: default. It s a nearly completely useless PoS. The original protocol author
: disavowed this work years ago as a mistaken gedankenexperiment, and the
: current ... "promoter" seemingly has never heard of IBM PC's or Macintoshes
: wherein the system administrator and the user are one in the same and thus
: the information provided is not even vaguely trustworthy.

Yah, yah, enabled or not, it does come in handy.  The information provided
could be anything at all (mine gives numeric uids), but it could well have
meaning to the admin on the system *providing* the info.  It helped me track
down a shell account user who was doing portscans on other hosts *much*
quicker than without, as the guy always did it while I was asleep.

However, you're right in that its value to administrators of other systems
is nil.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)