Talk and write
12 September 2002

On 12 September, I activated talkd, the talk daemon, in /etc/initd.conf by uncommenting this line:

ntalk dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.talkd

Make sure that you don't uncomment talk also -- this will lead to "Error on read from talk daemon: Connection refused." I think ntalk and talk may be alternatives with slightly different behaviors -- just don't use both.

I then do a

kill -HUP <inetd pid>

to reload the net daemon configuration. I issue talk <user> from one user to another on cyberspace, but get this in /var/log/messages:

error: cannot execute /usr/sbin/in.talkd: No such file or directory

It simply looks to me like I don't have SuSE's "talk-server" package from n1, so I go to the SuSE mirrors site at http://www.suse.de/en/private/download/ftp/int_mirrors.html and try a couple of places; ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/SuSE-Linux/i386/ has 7.3 as does
ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/suse/suse/i386/

In n1 there are two packages -- talk-server and talk. I installed both on both gubbio and cyberspace, with no protests. Again I issue kill -HUP to reload the daemon configuration file.

It's working!

The command mesg says current status and can be used to block incoming talk requests. It's set to yes.

The advantage of this system is that it's terminal-based, so I can use it from home, logged into the office remotely through ssh, to chat with students in the lab. Eventually you could have office hours through a web cam -- if you had a very fast connection at home -- or at least an X-windows talk client like ktalk. But for the moment this is perfect.

From the office, I may be able to use a KDE popup program -- though initd won't let me run ktalkd and talkd at the same time.

Anyway, this is now working. You've solved the e-mail problem and the talk problem.

Write

There's also a write daemon. kwrited is installed, but not the old writed. This could also be useful -- just to flash a message, or even give instructions.

The SuSE package used to be nkitb in n -- this is part of the same netkit packages as the talk server; cf. http://freshmeat.net/projects/netkit. However, they've moved it into some other package -- nkitb doesn't exist in SuSE 7.3.

I'm having no luck finding writed -- on the other hand, I also discover that write works fine on cyberspace. It just doesn't work from one machine to another, but that's really no big deal for me. Basically, write also works.