SGI Freeware: plan 1.8.5

plan-1.8.5: description + notes

plan is a schedule planner based on X/Motif. It displays a month calendar similar to xcal, but every day box is large enough to show appointments in small print. By pressing on a day box, the appointments for that day can be listed and edited. Appointments are entered with the following information (everything except the time is optional):

the date, time, and length (time and days) of the appointment,
an optional text message to be printed,
an optional script to be executed,
early-warn and late-warn triggers that precede the alarm time
repetitions: n_th weekdays, days-of-the-month, every n days, yearly
optional fast command-line appointment entry
flexible ways to specify holidays and vacations
extensive context help
multiuser capability using an IP server program (with access lists),
grouping of appointments into files, per-user, private, and others

The action being taken when a warn or alarm time is reached is programmable; by default a window pops up. In addition, a program can be executed, or mail can be sent. Other methods of listing appointments (today, this week, next week, or a keyword search for regular expressions) are also available. Plan can be configured to display times in 12-hour or 24-hour formats, mmddyy and ddmmyy date formats, and can show either Monday or Sunday in the leftmost column. Four view modes are supported: month, year, week, day, and a 365-day overview. The day, week, and overview plot appointments as colored and labeled bars on a time chart.
This distributions contains four binaries, one directory, and several text files. The executables are:

/usr/freeware/bin/plan
The schedule program. It displays the calendars and allows entry of appointments. It writes everything to .dayplan* files in the user's home directory, and other files or to the IP server, netplan. It does not check for alarms, this is done by the pland daemon. plan can be used without pland and notifier, but no alarms will be triggered.
/usr/freeware/lib/pland
The daemon that waits for alarm events, and pops up windows, sends mail, and/or executes a program when an alarm time is reached. It creates a lockfile /tmp/.planUID, with UID being the user's user ID. The lockfile prevents multiple pland's. It also contains pland's process ID, which is read by plan to find out where change notification (HUP) signals should be sent. pland should be started in the user's .sgisession or .xsession file.
/usr/freeware/lib/notifier
A program that prints a file (or standard input) into a window. Depending on the options, the window is green, yellow, or red. pland uses notifier to display messages; notifier was not integrated into pland to keep the pland executable as small as possible (X/Motif programs tend to be large).
/usr/freeware/lib/netplan
An IP network server that manages appointment files. plan can read appointment files directly, but this should be done ONLY if files are not shared by multiple users. The netplan server runs on a single server host; all plan and pland programs on the net can connect to it and read and write appointments. You can either start netplan manually on the server host or "chkconfig fw_netplan on". No entry in inetd.conf is required, netplan watches a well-known port.
The following directory and files are also required:

/usr/freeware/lib/netplan.dir
The directory that netplan puts files into, and the only directory that netplan will read from (see Network Security).
/usr/freeware/lib/netplan.dir/.netplan-acl
Access list for netplan that determines which user and system has read, write, and delete access to which appointment files.
/usr/freeware/lib/plan_cal.ps
The PostScript skeleton for the print functions.
/usr/freeware/lib/plan.help
All online help texts
/etc/init.d/fw_netplan
boot script for SGI only. Softlinked to /etc/rc0.d/K39fw_netplan and /etc/rc2.d/S99fw_netplan.
The remaining files are optional and can be installed manually. The first two are recommended, the rest is optional:

/usr/freeware/etc/plan/holiday_*
Holiday files for many countries. Copy the appropriate one to ~/.holiday.
/usr/freeware/etc/plan/Plan.icon
Copy this file to your ~/.icons directory to get a full-color icon.
/usr/freeware/etc/plan/Plan.xpm
icon pixmap for non-SGI systems.
/usr/freeware/etc/plan/Mkdoc
a contributed perl script that converts plan.help to troff source.
/usr/freeware/etc/plan/Killpland
a contributed perl script that can be called from ~/.logout to kill pland on logout (also see pland -l/-L options).
/usr/freeware/etc/plan/Monochrome
a sample resource list for monochrome systems, to be appended to ~/.Xdefaults.

plan and notifier print usage messages when an unknown option is used; pland has only one option, -k, that kills the existing daemon first if there is one. In particular, plan -d and notifier -d dump the default X resources; you can do "plan -d >>.Xdefaults" and modify the resources. If the EUC code is used for Japanese, a filter is needed at PostScript printing for conversion to the SJIS code. e.g.:
   nkf -s | lpr -PPSprinter
   euctosj | lpr -PPSprinter (Sun with JLE)
Note -- I do not guarantee the accuracy of the .holiday template files in the distribution.
Network Security

Here is information that your system administrator will want to know. IP services are potential security risks if written improperly. I make no promises that netplan is completely secure but I made every effort to avoid the usual pitfalls. netplan is small enough so you can check for yourself. If you have stringent security policies, do not trust netplan.
Apart from controlling access to appointment files, netplan must satisfy general security concerns. In particular, it must not be usable to open network security holes that allow access to files that have nothing to do with plan. The security features are:

if run by root or setuid root, netplan switches to "nobody". The UID and GID of nobody are compiled in, not determined at runtime. netplan will refuse to run setgid-but-not-setuid root.
netplan does not execute other programs (this is one of the reasons why there are still pland daemons).
netplan cannot be used to access files that are not in its home directory, /usr/freeware/lib/netplan.dir by default. Absolute paths are converted to paths relative to the home directory.
netplan refuses to access softlinks and files that have more than one hardlink. This may be inconvenient at times, but without this the user who started netplan would be wide open for the entire net.
netplan is not sendmail. All buffers are checked for overflows.
netplan (as well as the rest of the code) is Purify'd.

plan Archives, homepage, and mailing list

Send bug reports to thomas@bitrot.in-berlin.de. Don't forget to include the version number as printed by "plan -v". Check out the TROUBLESHOOTING section in plan.help (or in the Help pulldown if that works), it contains solutions for common problems.
Information on the current version can be found on plan's home page, http://www.bitrot.de/plan.html.
The main ftp site for this program is ftp.fu-berlin.de (directory /pub/unix/graphics/plan). ftp.x.org (contrib/applications) also has plan, but is sometimes out of date. ftp.fu-berlin.de also has a Linux executable for people without Motif.
To subscribe to the plan mailing list, send a mail with "subscribe plan" in the message body (not the subject) to majordomo@bitrot.de The list carries a low volume and is mainly used for announcements and patches.
Copyright

plan is Copyrighted by Thomas Driemeyer, 1993-1998. License to copy, publish, and distribute is granted to everyone provided that three conditions are met:

my name and email address, "Thomas Driemeyer " must remain in the distribution and any documentation that was not part of this distribution. In particular, my name and address must be shown in the About popup.
if you redistribute a modified version, the fact that the version is modified must be stated in all places that my name is shown.
this copyright notice must be included in your distribution.

If these conditions are met, you can do whatever you like. The idea is that I would be pissed if someone else claimed he wrote the thing, and I don't want bugs introduced by others attributed to me. Make as much money with it as you can. Drop me a line, I am curious.
If you put plan on a CD, send me a free copy if your company policy allows it and you want to. (Not obligatory, I just collect trophies.)
There are no implied or expressed warranties for plan. I do not claim it is good for anything whatsoever, and if you lose your precious data or your dog dies this is entirely your problem.

Special thanks to Andrea Suatoni (a.suatoni@telefonica.net) for helping port this package to IRIX.
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.