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How do I make Finger and whois work through my firewall?

April 26, 2017finger firewall firewalls internet port security SSL whois

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How do I make Finger and whois work through my firewall?

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Many firewall admins permit connections to the finger port from only trusted machines, which can issue finger requests in the form of: finger user@host.domain@firewall. This approach only works with the standard Unix version of finger. Controlling access to services and restricting them to specific machines is managed using either tcp_wrappers or netacl from the firewall toolkit. This approach will not work on all systems, since some finger servers do not permit user@host@host fingering. Many sites block inbound finger requests for a variety of reasons, foremost being past security bugs in the finger server (the Morris internet worm made these bugs famous) and the risk of proprietary or sensitive information being revealed in user’s finger information. In general, however, if your users are accustomed to putting proprietary or sensitive information in their .plan files, you have a more serious security problem than just a firewall can solve.