Talk:Ident protocol

Broadcasting
Is the use of the term "ident" in this article really so much more widespread than its use in television broadcasting? They both seem like technical jargon to me; perhaps a disambiguation page would be more appropriate. I'm sure people from each field would argue that their use is more widespread. Is there any way of objectively determining which (if either) is more widely known? If neither is a much more important use, it seems we should go with a disambiguation. --96.234.65.164 (talk) 02:48, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I suspect that the broadcasting term is more common now a days and not having a DAB page is just the result of wikipedia's history of being computer/techie oriented (WP:BIAS). Wrs1864 (talk) 11:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Historic
There was some talk of moving the IDENT standard to from PROPOSED STANDARD to HISTORIC status a while back. 62.255.32.10 02:29, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * hmm got a url for that? its interesting but not terriblly relavent to the real world. The fact is that ident is the de-facto standard way of identifying who made a connection from a multiuser box. Plugwash 20:18, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Credentials
A comment in the article said this:


 * anyone got any credentials for these guys? (ie why are their opinions meaningfull?)

I'm not sure why it matters -- they've each written articles on ident that make good arguments. A quick survey shows that Russ Nelson is president of the Open Source Initiative and Erik Fair seems to have something to do with the IETF. Neither individual has an article on Wikipedia, though. Graue 07:15, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Russ Nelson is a past president of the Open Source Initiative and Erik Fair is a lord of time (NTP) and email (SMTP); one can only assume that he knows everything about ident as well. RussNelson 00:49, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

but who really cares, they are decent articles none the less

Cleanup
I have done a cleanup, changes can be seen at the diff --NigelJ talk 07:34, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Request from Newbie
Friends, I greatly appreciate whatever was said above. I am a legitimate person interested in using IRC, and mIRC is not letting me on hardly any DALnet servers. I get some sort of Ident error and am locked out, with no ability to ask anyone "what the heck". mIRC never did this in the past. Can someone please put in simple words, what a simple, legit user is to do. I expect most of you who post here are on IRC every day. I last used it to talk to fellow science folks when rovers landed on Mars 1.5 to 2 years ago (no ident problem), and now I want to check on other things. However, I can hardly get onto IRC for want of ident... I can only access just some little server where no one is answering questions.

If anyone can post an extremely simple explain of 1, 2, 3, how legit users address the ident issue, I would greatly appreciate it. The frustrating thing is that I cannot access anyone responding to IRC Help on this one little net... and I think I was lucky to get on any DALnet, since I have no idea what ident I am missing.

In the event it matters / helps the answer, I am on a new PC, and all my old setups are gone. However, I have my mIRC license, and paid Khaled more than he asked over the years. mIRC was, in the past, very cool. Also, I'm behind a home LAN router (but I'm the only one who ever used IRC).

It's impolite to throw up something that bars the entirely occasional (1 year or so) but entirely legit user from being able to use IRC.

I have rambled enough. Would someone knowledgeable please treat me kindly and make things as simple as possible. Of course, you can overwrite/erase this entire section I have written. But please leave behind, "Ident Help For Dummies"... Help for the legit occasional IRC user stumped by Ident's that stop them from getting on IRC - which is where they might ask what the heck Idents problems are - when they are entirely legit.

I thank you in advance for your assistance, my friend - MikeTheRed


 * configure your router to forward port 113 to your machine. Plugwash 10:45, 2 July 2006 (UTC)


 * In addition to that, open "Options" in Mirc (alt-o usually does that), Click on "Connect", then click on "Ident", then check the box next to "Enable IdentD server". Nahum 00:17, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

NPOV vs "Usefulness of Ident"
Ident was once useful, but in the modern world is utterly, 100% useless. This section should be removed or replaced with pure past-tense.
 * Completely untrue, it is useless for connections coming from machines where the admin is the same (or belived to be the same) as the abuser. But for say accounts on a commercial shell host it should be as usefull as ever. Plugwash (talk) 00:49, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * well, ok, my opinion is that ident is utterly useless in about 90%+ of the cases. I doubt that even 10% of the time that there is an admin that isn't the abuser.  Yeah, this has changed since the 1980s, when ident was designed. Wrs1864 (talk) 00:58, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Dude, you wrote that note in 2008. In 1996 I had to search high and low to find a commercial shell host, it's now 12 years later and I bet you can count all the commercial shell hosts in the world on one hand. An authentication protocol which is vulnerable to 1% of hosts out there is questionable, one which is vulnerable for 99.99999% of the hosts and useful for 0.00000001% of the hosts is downright silly. In any case a section on "usefulness" which doesn't explain why it might not be useful for something which is usually not useful is pretty non-POV. 87.127.95.198 (talk) 08:00, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Security section is nonsense
Most of the information in the Security section is nonsense because the target system would first have to establish a connection to the attacker. Only then could the attacker see the user name of the user that established the connection (and only of that user). Even an "insecure" identd sending real user names can not be abused by an attacker to enumerate user handles.

"One popular daemon program is identd"
identd isn't one single program, it's a name many OS distros use for their own built-in ident server that they ship. There are many different programs called identd. So that claim is a bit confusing and should probably be changed/removed.

"IDenfi" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect IDenfi. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. signed,Rosguill talk 21:35, 19 February 2020 (UTC)