I was sure this story was going to end with your script causing chaos by calling finger in a busy loop. But every 2 minutes! Even in the 90s, that's a pretty mild amount of network traffic.
some people had these setups and just never saw a lot of traffic because the boxes werent broadly routed on the internet etc. or internal.
now with all the scans and automated spamming by parties its totally unthinkable. most of my server bandwidth despite my efforts is going to this.. (thankfully down pay for that per bytes anymore!)