Ident Server

I recently encountered a problem on a server that I manage where by the oidentd server didn’t seem to be working.

Manual tests worked, but connecting to IRC Servers didn’t.

I tried switching oidentd with ident2 and the same problem.

After switching back, and a bit of debugging later it appeared that the problem was that the IRC Servers were expecting spaces in the ident reply, whereas oidentd wasn’t giving them.

I then quickly threw together an xinet.d-powered ident server with support for spoofing.

First the xinet.d config:

service ident
{
 disable = no
 socket_type = stream
 protocol = tcp
 wait = no
 user = root
 server = /root/identServer.php
 nice = 10
}

Unfortunately yes, this does need to run as root otherwise it is unable to see what process is listening on a socket. In future I plan to change it to allow it to run without needing to be root (by using sudo for the netstat part)

Now for the code itself:

Edit: The code is now available on github: ShaneMcC/phpident

I welcome any comments about this, or any improvements and hope that it will be useful for someone else.