1unix rwho0

[Brad Miller <miller@doughnut.cs.rochester.edu>]

1    Date: Mon, 14 Sep 87 12:10 EDT
    From: Eric S. Crawley <Crawley@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	Date: Thu, 10 Sep 87 14:48:43 EDT
	From: royt@pravda.gatech.edu (Roy M Turner)


	I was looking over the documentation and noticed that the Symbolics
	supports something called unix-rwho service; however, upon looking it
	up in the TCP code, I didn't see that it really *did* anything except 
	intercept rwho packets from unix hosts and store them in a variable.
	Does anyone have any functions to make use of this information, such
	as something that will do the equivalent of unix's rwho command?  Or 
	even better, a replacement server that will send information back to 
	Unix's rwho server, so that information about the lisp machines show
	up in rwho's done on unix?

	Thanks.

	Roy

    The Unix RWHO server has been removed in 7.2.  It is still in the files
    but commented out at the moment.  It was removed because it is not a
    standard Internet or lispm protocol and no one complained that it didn't
    work.  The questions were more like "Why is this here?".  If you want a
    hack that will give better information than the Unix RWHO, take a look
    at the server-finger hack in SYS:EXAMPLES;.  

It may give better info (well, then again, looks pretty much the same to me),
but it isn't free: it fingers all your machines every n minutes. UNIX machines
already broadcast RWHO, so the ideal soln, would be to take advantage of
what's already on the net, and only fingering machines that aren't telling you
anyway. RWHO may not be an internet standard, but how many sites don't have
UNIX machines? RWHO is like NFS. It's there, it works, you may as well take
advantage of it. Plus it's efficient: usually RWHO packets are broadcast.
------
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...[allegra|seismo]!rochester!miller}
Brad Miller
University of Rochester Computer Science Department
0------
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...[allegra|seismo]!rochester!miller}
Brad Miller
University of Rochester Computer Science Department