What is ident?

[roadrunner]

What is ident?
Excerpts from RFC 1413:

The Identification Protocol (a.k.a., "ident", a.k.a., "the Ident Protocol") provides a means to determine the identity of a user of a particular TCP connection. Given a TCP port number pair, it returns a character string which identifies the owner of that connection on the server's system. An Identification server may reveal information about users, entities, objects or processes which might normally be considered private. An Identification server provides service which is a rough analog of the CallerID services provided by some phone companies and many of the same privacy considerations and arguments that apply to the CallerID service apply to Identification. If you wouldn't run a "finger" server due to privacy considerations you may not want to run this protocol.

Three popular applications that use 'ident' are:


sendmail
inn (a.k.a. usenet news)
irc
Anything that relies on ident will most likely "hang" as the "reverse" ident connection times out. The best way to handle ident packets in this case is to reject them (and optionally don't log them): any any ident reject no log

-- GuyR - 15 Jan 2004


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