Re: rwhod

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org>]

Martin Schulze:
> I believe there are security concerns.  Via rwho protocol your machine
> distributes information on who is logged in.  So you are able to play
> big brother and generate personal profiles for instance.

According to the man page:

     Rwhod operates as both a producer and consumer of status information. As
     a producer of information it periodically queries the state of the system
     and constructs status messages which are broadcast on a network.  As a 
     consumer of information, it listens for other rwhod servers' status mes­
     sages, validating them, then recording them in a collection of files lo­
     cated in the directory /var/spool/rwho.

Since broadcast packets shouldn't leave your local network, I don't think
that anyone in the outside world can listen in on the rwho messages, so I
_think_ it's safe for use if you trust all the hosts on your subnet.

-- 
see shy jo


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