DNS 替代 Finger 协议方案

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DNS: A Replacement For Finger Bender!MVit16Gude 2026-10-18 17:42:39No.42[Delete][Edit][Report]

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🧸 DNS: A Replacement For Finger

OR ... Finger your friends anonymously.

What is finger?

Finger is an unencrypted TCP service that by default resides on port 79. There are very few instances of finger still running today and even fewer listening on the internet. It was meant for people to query each others workstations or servers to see what they are currently up to. Think of it like a status message that might be set on a chat server. Maybe we can recreate finger in a service that already exists by having a standard location and record type. In 2026 there are probably more people with their own domains or developer sub-domains than there are people exposing port 79 to the internet.

Let us pretend we made a standard.

• Create a single DNS TXT text record and give it a fairly low TTL.
finger 69s in txt "status: currently spending time on hacker news."
• Update the zone serial number and push the DNS update.

A shell function to replace the finger binary?

function finger() { Dom="$1";dig +short +nocookie -t txt finger."${Dom}" ; }

finger altchan.org
"status: currently spending time on hacker news."

That's it! Now we have a status message we can update that our friends should be able to reach from just about anywhere. Making tea? Update DNS. Watching football? Update DNS. Arguing with AI? Update DNS. Updating DNS? Update DNS.

What are the limitations?

The length limit of a DNS TXT record is 255 characters. One could use that to publish a URL to a status page. It is possible to have multiple records but use cation when doing so as many large TXT records can be abused for DDoS purposes. dig -t txt ebay.com for a DDoS Example used today. If one may hit that 255 limit, instead paste a URL to a blog article in it.

Dependencies:

dig or your preferential equivalent. Perhaps you prefer a tool that uses DoH or DoT or DoQ

But not everyone has a domain? Fair point. Maybe have finger-username.domain.tld but then we may need a second shell function and a way for friends to update our domain.

Anon 2026-10-21 13:00:33No.44[Delete][Edit][Report]>>46

finger altchan.org
"status: pooping up the internet."

what do you use to stay regular?

Bender!MVit16Gude 2026-10-22 01:51:42No.46[Delete][Edit][Report]

>>44
tudca and berberine among other things :-D

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