:> 2. Most shell services do a good job of keeping ident reliable. They need
:> to do that because most IRC networks heavily penalize clients that don't
:> return any ident.
:
:This is changing. In the face of ${BIGNUM} Windoze boxes giving ident
:answers like "HAX0r", there is little point, except for the administrator
:of the box _giving_ the ident. If that was me, it would be _low_ on my
:list.
ident is extremely useful when taken in the proper context. It doesn't
really matter what a user-owned box returns. An IRC administrator only
cares about two things:
* If the irc client is connecting from an (ISP's) multi-user shell
machine, that the ident contain sufficient information to identify
the user.
* If the irc client is connecting from a single-user machine, such as
a windoz box, the IRC administrator has the IP address and times
involved, which is again sufficient for the user's ISP to identify
the user.
When a user is abusing an IRC server, the IRC administrator has two
choices:
* If it is coming from an ISP who takes abuse seriously, the IRC
administrator need only identify the user sufficiently (IP and time,
or ident info if coming from a shared shell box) such that the ISP
can kick the user off the service.
* If it is coming from an ISP who does not take abuse seriously, the
IRC administrator locks out the entire ISP.
At BEST ident was turned on on all machines and it returned the user's
real user name. It did that because it made it a whole lot easier for us
to handle abuse issues, it cut abuse significantly, and it cut
abuse-related email from remote IRC admins significantly because they
could lockout specific users based on the ident info without having to
contact us.
I don't work at BEST any more, but I would love to see kernel support
for ident lookups. To make identd work reasonably well, I had to hack
the server to timeout after a few seconds worth of cpu-bound searching
through KVM, because it would sometimes get into scanning loops.
-Matt
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