Joey & DJG's Ident Guide
Created on August 6th, 1999.
Last updated on October 1st, 1999.
Most probably the reason you are reading this is because you are trying to connect to IRC and the server won't allow you to because you do not have ident installed. Well installing ident is fairly simple, but due to the demand of this problem, we decided to make a guide for it.
First of all, you must have the pidentd package installed. To verify that you have it installed, type:
rpm -q pidentd
And you should see something like this:
[lyte@shadow ~]# rpm -q pidentd
pidentd-2.8.5-3
[lyte@shadow ~]#
If you don't have it installed, simply get the rpm from your Red Hat Linux cdrom or download it here.
To install the rpm, as root type:
rpm -Uvh pidentd-2.8.5-3.i386.rpm
And you will see something like this:
pidentd ####################################
Next up you must edit /etc/inetd.conf. As root, type pico /etc/inetd.conf and scroll down to the bottom of the file where you will see a line that looks like this:
#auth stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/in.identd in.identd -l -e -o
You must uncomment it (take away the # infront of the line) so it will look like this:
auth stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/in.identd in.identd -l -e -o
Once that is done, hit control x and choose to save it. Now as root you must type killall -HUP inetd for the changes to take effect. Now you should be able to get onto IRC and have ident enabled. To check and see if it is working, start up your IRC client and connect to an IRC server such as irc.dal.net.
Now type /whois your_nick_name and see if there is a ~ infront of your ident such as ~lyte@20.23.23.63 etc. If there is then something is wrong. Please note that not all servers require ident and that the server might not strip the "~" off your ident. Now to see if it is working but the server is at fault, look in /var/log/messages for anything that resembles the following:
Aug 3 21:31:13 shadow identd[6310]: Connection from irc.home.com
If you have those entries then don't worry, everything is working. If not, then re-read this guide and verify your steps. If further problems persist, visit #LinuxHelp.net on DALnet.
If you're running IP Masquerading and use IRC, then you'll probably at some point run into the problem of using ident on one of your client computers. For this example, I'll assume that you have a Linux computer set up as the MASQing firewall and a Windows box set up as the client. I'll also assume that your using a Class C network.
There is an identd replacement called midentd which was made for this purpose. It is availible at http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/10/15/908491264.html. After installing it you will be left with some configuration files. The files should be /etc/midentd.conf and /etc/midentd.mircusers.
In /etc/midentd.conf simply put a "1".
In /etc/midentd.mircusers put the IPs of the Windows Box. For example, mine is 192.168.0.2
Then comment out the original 'auth' line in /etc/inetd.conf and add this line:
auth stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/sbin/midentd midentd
Now killall -HUP inetd and try using ident with mIRC. It should work now.
For more help read the README file of the package.
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