I just found my old gopher page. Given that's still up the user account must be there. Is the username listed on gopherspace the same as the login name?
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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@siipale For current accounts, yes. I can't answer definitively for legacy ones. I've only been on SDF a couple years now.
Could my 10 year old SDF account still exist?
Mine does. I finally remembered to log back in and there she is...
Caveat: the hostname had changed; I signed up at lonestar.sdf.org IIRC (no longer extant) and now it is on freeshell.org
I found my notes from ten years ago so I know what my username was
Another caveat: I think usernames were truncated to 8 chars in that time period. Don't know if that's the case now or not, or if extra chars are thrown away anyhow.
I tried finger as the other commenter suggested. I tried bunch of variations. Whole username, 8 chars truncated, and a shorter version which was in my notes. I also tried both sdf.org and freeshell.org. All of them gave me an empty output. I guess the fact that it didn't output no such user means it must be either of them. Or all of them refer to the same user.
I also found an email sent from my sdf user. The address in format [email protected] had the whole username (more than 8 chars). Then there's the shortest version of the name in my notes. That's written as sdf.lonestar.org/1/users/username. No idea what that refers to. Seems I didn't take very good notes. So which of these would more probably be the correct one?
For finger to work remotely, you have to have set up a .plan file as well as applied correct permissions to it at the time in your home directory.
I have a .plan file, I get that response from finger when I'm on SDF but it doesn't work when I do the lookup remotely. I don't recall the needed permissions.
$ finger chance
Login: chance Name: Chance Platt
Directory: /sdf/arpa/af/c/chance Shell: /usr/pkg/bin/bash
On since Sun Jun 9 09:56 2024 (UTC) on pts/19 from 99.162.15.208
Mail last read Sun Jun 9 09:48 2024 (UTC)
Plan: I'm friendly-like.
Now, since you know your username, there is a password reset mechanism:
I tried recover but it says no such user. It very well might be that I didn't set up any password recovery ten years ago. So either there's no user with that login anymore or it reports no such user because it's not set up for recovery. Maybe I'll try make a new user with same username.
This is not true. I do not have a ~/.plan file. I just double checked in case I set one up and forgot about it.
finger still pulls some basic information without one.
You likely signed up when it was sdf.lonestar.org but I think SDF has had the sdf.org domain for 15+ years at this point, and the freeshell.org domain has been around for over twenty.
Don’t forget sdf-eu.org, if thats what you originally used.
You can run the command finger [email protected] to see if an account with that name exists.
Does that work for you? I tried it locally, and got no results. I also tried it from a shell on sdf, and also got no results.
@murph It does. Try finger [email protected] (that's me).
It does work for your account, but not mine. Is it something that needs to be explicitly enabled, or the information put in somewhere?
@murph It was argued that you need to have a ~/.plan file, but I do not have one.
I do not recall having had to do anything to enable it.
So, after a little more digging, I found that what is displayed by finger can be changed with SDF's maint command.
I may or may not have done this. I can't remember for certain. It's also possible that the default settings were different 10 years ago.
Have you tried emailing [email protected]?
lol, you just want to be fingered 🤣