identd

[Mark Copper <mcopper@earthlink.net>]

Dear Users,

I am confused about what the ident daemon does.  

"Rute User's tutorial" identifies it as a possible security hole.  Is it?

A few days ago messages like "identd: started" started showing in my
syslog, and seeing there had been some kind of expoit, I updated the
package.  Following the readme, I replaced the "ident" line in inet.conf
with an "auth" line.  This seemed necessary in order to bring IP
masquerading up to speed.  I wonder why.

In the ident2 package readme, it says IP masquerading is not supported
but that essentially (?) the same results can be obtained by sending
random replies, so I entered the random option in the inet.conf command
line.  Well, today my auth log records random replies being
sent to some IP I don't know.  This is what's supposed to happen, right?

Thanks.

Mark