The WWW to Finger Gateway

with support for faces

To try the gateway, simply enter as a keyword an address of the form user@hostname. The gateway can also be used non-interactively by anchoring to a URL of the form:

    http://www.cs.indiana.edu/finger/hostname/username/w

The last two components are optional; the /w provides more verbose output as per RFC 1288, but exactly what will happen is obviously server-dependent.

This gateway was written and is maintained by Marc VanHeyningen. The faces support is possible due to the picons curator, Steve Kinzler.

People who are not really involved but who make nice demo links include Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, Howard Rheingold and our own Douglas Hofstadter, or maybe somebody even more famous.

This gateway was recently (Nov 1 1994) modified; it now uses <PRE> instead of the obsolete <XMP> to return finger information, and will attempt to extract links per the URI WG standard for encapsulating URLs in plain text.

Information and sources for faces/picons are available here. If you or your organization does not have an image, information on how to submit one is here.

If you have problems, please check to see whether the address in question can be fingered directly before reporting a problem in the gateway. Sometimes the finger server at site somebody.org will time out; if so, the gateway can't really do much other than return that timeout to the user (along with, at least, the faces information.)