If you’re an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) user like me, you’re probably familiar with or at least have heard of an identd service. IdentD is simply a service that, when accessed on port 113 of a computer, returns a simple string that identifies you as a user. If you were to watch the traffic you’d see something like this

1234,6578 : USERID : UNIX : itsmemario

Most OSX IRC clients don’t support this feature, and very few (if any) IRC servers require it any more. For those who needed this in the past, there was Identd for Mac. Which created a simple and functional icon in MacOS:

However in OSX Yosemite IdentD for Mac stopped working. The original author, Gallerand Sebastien, stepped up and made a new version. I’ve translated (as best as I could) his article and made a copy of his code here. So far it works great.

For those using the old IdentD

If you had previously installed identd, remove the old version:

# Clean Up !!!
sudo killall identd
sudo rm -R /Library/StartupItems/IdentD
sudo rm -R /Library/PreferencePanes/IdentD.prefPane
sudo rm -R /usr/local/identd

Now you’re ready to set up the new IdentD as a service.

Download, extract and set up IdentD

1- Download the file identd

2- Extract it to the desktop and you get a folder named identd.

Now the fun part.. installing stuff!

3- These commands will copy identd to the proper location and start it up

# Prepare
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/identd
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/local/identd

# Install
cd ~/Desktop/identd/
sudo cp ./identd /usr/local/identd/
sudo cp ./identd.conf /usr/local/identd/
sudo cp ./org.macmax.identd.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/local/identd/identd
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/identd/identd
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/local/identd/identd.conf
sudo chmod 644 /usr/local/identd/identd.conf
sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macmax.identd.plist
sudo chmod 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macmax.identd.plist

# Load & Start
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macmax.identd.plist
# identd will start on boot up now.

4- Now test to see if identd is running

# Try :
ps aux | grep identd | grep root

# should report a process belonging to root
# root 1393   0.0  0.0   861896   7012   ??  Ss   Sat07PM   0:01.79 /usr/local/identd/identd

5- Now let’s send a test ident call to the service

# type this at your terminal prompt :
telnet codethought.com 113

Which should return something like this:

Trying ::1...
Connected to codethought.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
_

You can enter something like this:

# Type the following and press Enter :
1234,5678

If all went well you’ll be greeted with this response, and you’re good to go!

1234,5678 : USERID : UNIX : JohnDoe

Connection closed by foreign host.

Customizing the User name

Let’s say you want a name other than JohnDoe.. NO problem.. the following lines would take care of that nicely

# Change name to YourNameHere
sudo sh -c "echo 1:YourNameHere > /usr/local/identd/identd.conf"
sudo launchctl stop org.macmax.identd

And you’re done!

Download the file identd.zip

Link to original code and article at macmax.org (in French)