GNU Inetutils

This is a distribution of common networking utilities and servers.

They are currently mostly from the 4.4BSD-Lite2 distribution, with
some changes to make them compatible with the GNU Hurd (in particular,
the Hurd does not define some arbitrary limits, such as MAXPATHLEN),
and to make them more portable, using autoconf.  A GNU build
environment has also been added.

The GNU whois client reads a whois-servers file to figure out which
whois server to use.  It won't always pick the best server;
whois.internic.net seems to know something about nic.ddn.mil, but the
GNU whois client will use nic.ddn.mil to look up nic.ddn.mil if you
use the configuration file we supply.  Our configuration file probably
also does not have a complete list of whois servers; feel free to send
information about additional whois servers to the bug reporting
address.

There are probably many BSD dependencies remaining, but inetutils is
believed to work on the following system types (and others may work):

  i486-pc-gnu
  i486-pc-linux-gnu
  m68k-hp-netbsd1.2
  sparc-sun-netbsd1.2

The file `paths' contains a list of all paths used by programs in this
distribution, and rules to find values for them.  To change a path
PATH_FOO, you may either tell configure, by using
`--with-path-foo=VALUE' (where VALUE may contain references to make
variables such as `$(bindir)'), or edit the `paths' file.

If you wish to build only the clients or only the servers, you may
wish to use the --disable-servers or --disable-clients options when
invoking `configure'.  You can also use --enable-<program> or
--disable-<program> to control whether to build individual programs;
if you explicitly specify whether to build a program, that will
override the values specified by --disable-clients or
--disable-servers.

Notes:

1) All the manpages will be installed, regardless of which programs
   are built.  The whois server list will also be installed.  You can
   use `make install-exec' instead of `make install' if you do not
   want to install these files.

2) All of the r* commands clients, rcp, rlogin, rsh, need to be
   install setuid root to work correctly they use priviledge ports for
   communication.

Some known deficiencies:

 - GNU Inetutils does not work on Solaris.  Patches to make GNU
   inetutils work on Solaris are happily accepted.

See the file INSTALL for installation instructions.

Please send all bug reports to <bug-inetutils@gnu.org>.