RWho

This program is similar to the who command, but maintains a central list of currently logged in accounts across multiple servers.

$ rwho
USER         HOST         LINE       FROM
grawity      ember        {45}       (tmux)
             land         pts/3      2a06:e881:108:2:64e6:9d86:856:b93c
             sky          pts/0      2a02:7b40:50d1:hjkl::1
             star         {13}       (tmux)
nobody       ember        pts/14     2001:778:e27f:0:9618:82ff:fe38:e480
             star         pts/9      star.nullroute.eu.org
             star         pts/1      78-59-7-25.static.zebra.lt

It was originally written in mid-2000s for a public-access Linux "shell account" network (similar to the ~tilde clubs~ of nowadays), back when you still had this sense of community around it... and when letting other people know your IP address didn't matter so much.

Nowadays, of course, it really shouldn't be used without carefully considering the privacy implications.

RWho was greatly inspired by the BSD Unix rwho, though has no direct relationship to it (except for the name).

Features

Data is stored on a central server (currently – in a MySQL database), with hosts sending live and periodic updates.

• Hosts use HTTP Basic authentication over TLS (Kerberos is also planned). Originally, in the spirit of Unix rwho, no authentication was done at all.

• "Agents" exist for Linux, BSDs, and Windows Server.

The information can be displayed through a fancy web interface or through the traditional Finger protocol. See it in action via HTTP or Finger.

• There is support for showing the user's ~/.plan file, either from the filesystem or LDAP attribute (see find_user_plan_file()).

Contents

• agent/ – new agent service for Linux (requires Python 3)
• agent-linux/ – old agent service for Linux and BSDs (requires Perl 5)
• agent-win32/ – old agent service for Windows XP/2003 (requires pywin32)
• server-php/ – API server for PHP
• ui-finger/ – a text interface for the Finger protocol (inetd-style)
• ui-web/ – a slightly fancy HTML interface for Mozilla 1.7 and Internet Explorer 5 (requires PHP 7.4)

Server installation

For the API:

1. Create a rwho.example.com virtual host.

2. Define aliases for the API endpoints:

   # Password (HTTP Basic) authenticated endpoint for hosts
   Alias /api/host /usr/local/rwho/server-php/index.php
   <Location /api/host>
       CGIPassAuth On
       Require all granted
   </Location>
   

   # Optional - Kerberos authenticated endpoint for CLI tools (not really used,
   # more of an experiment, although the Linux Python agent can optionally use it)
   Alias /api/gss /usr/local/rwho/server-php/index.php
   <Location /api/gss>
       AuthType GSSAPI
       Require valid-user
   </Location>
   

3. Create the configuration file /usr/local/rwho/server.conf, make sure it is readable by PHP-FPM, and define at least the [db] section.

4. Initialize the database using mysql rwho < init.sql.

For the web interface:

1. Point DocumentRoot at the web UI directory:

   DocumentRoot /usr/local/rwho/ui-web
   <Directory /usr/local/rwho/ui-web>
       AllowOverride All
       Require all granted
   </Directory>
   

2. Create the configuration file /usr/local/rwho/rwho.conf, make sure it is readable by PHP-FPM. (Currently the web UI will load both rwho.conf for frontend settings and server.conf for database settings.)

For the finger interface:

1. (Documentation pending, but it's just a systemd socket or xinetd entry for in.rwho-fingerd.)

2. Create the configuration file /usr/local/rwho/rwho.conf. (Currently the UI will load both rwho.conf for frontend settings and server.conf for database settings.)

Client installation

If authentication is enabled, use ./genpw on the server to generate an example config. (All tools use the same configuration format.)

Linux agent (Python):

1. Install python-pyinotify.
2. Create a rwho service user.
3. Create /etc/rwho/agent.conf (with the authentication password if needed, or at least an empty file otherwise) and chown it to rwho:.
4. Add the service using systemctl enable ./agent/rwho-agent.service.

Linux/BSD agent (Perl):

1. (Documentation pending)

Windows agent (Python):

1. Install PyWin32.
2. (Documentation pending, as it probably doesn't even run on modern systems anymore.)