RFC 1413 (rfc1413) - Page 3 of 8

Identification Protocol

RFC 1413                Identification Protocol            February 1993


5.  RESPONSE TYPES

A response can be one of two types:

USERID

     In this case,  is a string consisting of an
     operating system name (with an optional character set
     identifier), followed by ":", followed by an
     identification string.

     The character set (if present) is separated from the
     operating system name by ",".  The character set
     identifier is used to indicate the character set of the
     identification string.  The character set identifier,
     if omitted, defaults to "US-ASCII" (see below).

     Permitted operating system names and character set
     names are specified in RFC 1340, "Assigned Numbers" or
     its successors.

     In addition to those operating system and character set
     names specified in "Assigned Numbers" there is one
     special case operating system identifier - "OTHER".

     Unless "OTHER" is specified as the operating system
     type, the server is expected to return the "normal"
     user identification of the owner of this connection.
     "Normal" in this context may be taken to mean a string
     of characters which uniquely identifies the connection
     owner such as a user identifier assigned by the system
     administrator and used by such user as a mail
     identifier, or as the "user" part of a user/password
     pair used to gain access to system resources.  When an
     operating system is specified (e.g., anything but
     "OTHER"), the user identifier is expected to be in a
     more or less immediately useful form - e.g., something
     that could be used as an argument to "finger" or as a
     mail address.

     "OTHER" indicates the identifier is an unformatted
     character string consisting of printable characters in
     the specified character set.  "OTHER" should be
     specified if the user identifier does not meet the
     constraints of the previous paragraph.  Sending an
     encrypted audit token, or returning other non-userid
     information about a user (such as the real name and
     phone number of a user from a UNIX passwd file) are



St. Johns