Reaching out with Eudora: ph and finger

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 ph. Of course the ph command is available on CMS and on the ADN UNIX machines. But if you've got Eudora, you don't have to log on to your ADN account to look anything up in ph.

Here's how to use ph -- and finger too -- from either flavor of Eudora (either MS-Windows or Mac).

The ph and finger dialog box is in the "Window" menu. Select "Window" from the menu bar, then select "Ph". Type ns.uic.edu (the name of the UIC ph server) in the "Ph Server" field. (If you want, you can tell Eudora that you want to use ns.uic.edu as your default ph name server. In the main menu, select "Special" from the menu bar, then select "Configuration". In the Configuration dialog box, type ns.uic.edu in the "Ph Server" field, then click the OK button.) Type all or part of the name of the person or department you want to look up in the "Ph command" field then click the Ph button.

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".

The ph dialog box has a second button labeled Finger. Finger also 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. Type the node name of that machine in the "Ph server" field (the machine-independent node name uic.edu works for all faculty and staff at UIC), type the person's name (or login id, if you know it) in the "Ph command" field, and then click the Finger button.

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 (or, as they are known in CMS, DOT PROJECT and DOT PLAN), finger also normally displays those files.

So, which should you use? 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).

Comments are appreciated; send them
to Judith Grobe Sachs, judygs@uic.edu