[PLUG] Help with 'talk'

john at meissen.org john at meissen.org
Fri May 3 20:56:01 UTC 2002


creelan at engr.orst.edu said:
> > Now 'talk' doesn't work anymore. Sort of.
>
> By doesn't work, you mean it just hangs while waiting for an
> invitation on the recipient's machine? or does it deny you permission
> to initiate the request.

The 'talk' client says:
 [Your party is refusing messages]

I turned on debugging, and the talkd daemon reports:

 find_request: ANNOUNCE: id 4294967295, l_user john, r_user john, r_tty pts/0
 process_request: ANNOUNCE <-- PERMISSION_DENIED, id 2

Unfortunately, this appears to be a catch-all for a number of problems
including if the open() call fails for any reason.

OK, now I'm going nuts. I'm sure I tried specifying the tty, because
I was changing permissions and ownership on some of devices and trying 
it. But now it works, if I specify the tty. :-( Guess I'll keep an eye 
on it and see if it's me or the system ;-)

One thing I have noticed.... with the older version(s) (from
Sun, Pyramid/Siemens, older Slackware, etc) it seemed to me that
the talk request was broadcast on each tty owned by you. This
version picks the first one it finds in utmp. If that one happens
to have 'mesg n' then the request fails regardless of the state of
any other tty's. Even if it's set right, you may never see the
request if the window is obscured.

Wonder if anyone is maintaining it these days?

john-








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