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Can't find your copy of the UIC faculty/staff phone directory? No problem. You
can find most of what you'd want to know about UIC faculty, staff, and departments
from the UIC online ph server. The ph server is there whenever and wherever you
need it, and unlike the printed phonebook, its database is updated every night.
There's also important information in the ph database that's not available in
the printed directory, including basic information about UIC students and the
URLs for people's personal World Wide Web home pages. The command used to query
the ph server is gopher://ns.uic.edu:105/2. The ph command is available on CMS
and on the ACCC UNIX machines, and is also available in Eudora.
For example, if you wanted to look me up, jud* sachs would work just
fine. Of course, just sachs would work too, but there are five Sachses
in the database. That's not really a problem, but don't try using smith
to look up someone named "Smith"! The ph server will tell you there's too many
entries to print and won't return anything.
Those of you who know me as Judy might be tempted to try using judy sachs,
but that wouldn't work, because I'm in the database as "Judith". The jud*
means "jud" followed by anything (including nothing!); it matches either "Judy"
or "Judith".
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The finger command on many UNIX systems offers information about
people and their computer accounts. You send finger requests to a specific
machine on which you know (or expect) that the person you're interested
in has an account. For example, you can finger me at my account on tigger:
finger judygs@tigger.uic.edu
Here judygs is my login id on tigger, and
tigger.cc.uic.edu
is the machine my account is on.
You can also finger anyone at UIC at the generic UIC node name uic.edu;
in this case, finger will return the individual's ph phonebook entry.
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Both ph and finger return information about people and their
computer accounts; when should you use one or the other?
The function of the ph command is pretty much standardized --
it's a telephone directory lookup command, and you can depend on it giving
you the type of information you'd find in a phonebook -- name, address,
telephone number, and email address.
There are no official standards on what finger should return,
though some things are pretty common -- name, login id, and email address.
And if the person/account you're fingering has a .project or a .plan
file, finger also normally displays those files. Though the latter
is not true at UIC; as a security measure, we've modified finger
on tigger and icarus so that it returns only ph information.
So, which should you use? At UIC, the answer is, it doesn't matter.
In general, however, you'll probably want to use ph when you want general
information about a particular person (particularly here at UIC), and to use
finger when you want specific information about the person's account(s).
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In Eudora, the ph and finger dialog box is in the "Special" menu. Select
"Window" from the menu bar, select "Directory Services".
Setup for ph: If you don't find UIC ph as
a choice in for "Configured Servers" (on the right), then double-click
Ph
from the Protocols box (on the top right). This will open the Modify Database
dialog box. Type UIC ph (or something else if you wish) in the "Server
name" field and ns.uic.edu (the name of the UIC ph server) in the
"Host name" field in the General tab, then click
OK.
Setup for finger: You send finger requests
to a specific machine on which you know (or expect) that the person you're
interested in has an account. You will probably have to enter the machine
name before you can finger it. Double-click Finger in the
Protocols box (top right). Type the name of that machine in the "Host name"
field (the machine-independent node name uic.edu works for all faculty
and staff at UIC) and type a name for the machine in "Server name" (say,
"finger machinename"), then click OK.
Using Directory Services: Click to place
a check mark in the box beside the server(s) that you want your query to
go to "Configured Servers" under "Databases" (on the right).
Type a netid or all or part of the name of the person or department
you want to look up in the "Query" field then click the Start button.
The result is in the box at the bottom left. (If you've searched more than
one server, double-click on the server name in the box at the top left to display
the results from that server.) |
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