Hokie Stalker

Virginia Tech People Search, People Finder, or, colloquially, Hokie Stalker, is a web search interface to the university directory.

Searching the University Directory

Searching with Firefox

Keyword searches can serve as handy shortcuts. In recent versions of Firefox, you can simply right-click in a search box and choose to add a keyword for the search. See the Mozilla article on "Smart Keywords".

Commandline People Search

The Virginia Tech finger server hooks into the same database as the web-based people search. Access to it using netcat is trivial:

$ echo charles steger | nc finger.vt.edu 79
OpenLDAP Finger Service...
1 exact match found for "charles steger":
"808122, People"
 Also Known As:
               Charles W Steger
               Charles W. Steger
 Title:        
               President and Prof. of Arch.
 Department:   
               President - Admin.
 Department Number:
               043100
 Work Address: 
               Office of the President
               210 Burruss Hall
               Blacksburg, VA 24061
 Mail Stop:    
               0131
 Work Phone:   
               5402316231
 E-Mail Address:
               president@vt.edu

It might be useful to turn this one-liner into a script if you need to lookup professor room numbers, email addresses, etc. on a regular basis. To do so, follow the steps below to create a script that can be called by typing hs.

# echo -e '#!/bin/bash\n\necho $* | nc finger.vt.edu 79' > /usr/local/bin/hs
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/hs

Privacy Settings

Managing via MyVT

To suppress personal information visit MyVT profile visibility after logging in via the central authentication system.

Computer Labs

In order to login at the Math Emporium, public visibility of ones PID was once required. This was fixed sometime in 2009 but as of fall 2009, public visibility of the PID is still required to log in to OSX from computers in the Torg computer labs.

See Also

• Searching

Links

• Virginia Tech | People Search
• Urban Dictionary Hokie Stalker entry