From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray)
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 94 00:53:51 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Finger/Remailer Ping server
Message-ID: <9404070753.AA05711@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



   Someone asked about having a "list of remailers" ping server
available via finger. I took some code I wrote over a year ago and
hacked together such a system. I need volunteers to run it.

The server does the following:

1)forks off a "cron" to automatically ping remailers every X hours
2)ping's the remailers (by requesting a remail to itself)
3)any remailers which respond will have their timestamps updated
4)any change in the status of remailers (a ping received) recreates
your .plan file as so

   copy .realplan to .plan
   tackon a banner for the list of remailers
   tackon a list of remailers and the last time a response was received
   (e.g.  remailer@remail.com      last heard from 2.3 days ago)

Anyone running this perl script from their .forward file will have
a list of remailers automatically embedded in their finger information.
Optimum use would be for remailer operators to add a line to their
maildelivery slocal configuration which catches
"Subject: --PING!--" (which is one of the ways pings are detected,
the body of the message is most important) and pipe it to the
script. Then you could just finger any remailer for a list of
remailers (assuming the remailer doesn't run from its own alias)


Note: the software may or may not work. I have only superficially
tested it by piping in fake pings. I have no idea whether or not
it will be stable so I need someone to run it for a few nights to see
if it works correctly (and if not, I can fix any fatal bugs)

-Ray  "Perl is the Ultimate Language"

-- Ray Cromwell        |    Engineering is the implementation of science;   --
-- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu  |       politics is the implementation of faith.     --