The custom ident daemon allows the customizable specification if an ident (or auth) reply on a per user basis.
The cidentd program is written for people who wish to have a working ident daemon but who do not necessarily want to allow the the responses to be truthfull.
This program can be configured to report the login name or uid on a per user basis without the need of the sysadmin recompiling the program or even restarting the daemon. It can also be used to hide the login name with a literal string, or an error message.
Historically, the ident daemon was used to determine the login username or number of a remote person who is connecting to a server. The use of this service (often referred to as the "auth" service) has been largely abandoned, but is kept alive by the Internet Relay Chat protocol (IRC), if only for the gag oppotunities allowed by windows IRC clients in specifying something like "all_your_base".
The standard Linux distribution program "pidentd" can be configured to either fork over the name or uid, but that is about as far as it goes. If you want to hide your login name or uid, you have the other option of "hiding" youself by creating a file in your home directory, in which case the program reports that you are a "hidden user".
Another program called "ridentd" outputs random strings as an ident response. And yet another "fake" ident daemon uses a hard coded string. I felt that all of these options fell short of my desired control over the process, and I wrote cidentd to fill that gap.
Kenny Root has been nice enough to contribute this rpm spec file so you can make an rpm from the source distro's above.
