TALK Daemon questions

[Bill Stapleton]

> In article <12052 at chaph.usc.edu> szeto at aludra.usc.edu (Johnny Szeto) writes:
> 
>    I have an interesting conversation with one of my friends in Canada.
>    BTW, we were conversing over the 'talk' command on unix.  But somehow
>    I think there are some problems associated with the process.

You're right about the problems.  You're probably better off just using mail.
 
In article <EMV.90Sep19221142 at picasso.math.lsa.umich.edu>, emv at math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
> Sounds like you need to get and install the "4.3" version of talk, also
> known as "ntalkd", on one or both of the systems.  It is available from
> uunet.uu.net in the /bsd-sources directory.
> 
> Byte ordering problems are the culprit here.  The protocol for in.talkd
> on 4.2-based systems is architecture dependent and cannot be relied to
> work between machines of different vendors.
[By the way, just to state it explicitly, "4.2" and "4.3" talks are not
compatible - You need the same version at both ends.]

I don't think that's the case in this instance, since he indicates that it
works OK sometimes.  I think it's probably talk's use of the Unreliable Data
Protocol (;-) that's at fault.  Over a distance, there's just too many
places for packets to get lost, with no checks or guarantees.  Canada??  :-)

--
Bill Stapleton
     wls at csd4.csd.uwm.edu
     uwmcsd4!wls