Talk and \"protocol not supported\"

[Barry Shein]

Just a few quick notes:

TALK is brain-damaged, I would not think of it as a standard utility,
it definitely should have been in the 'unsupported' (new) directory,
it would have been more honest. The code looks like it was written
by a hyperactive 12 year old on a sunday night deadline...

HOWEVER, it should work locally. It only uses UDP, even on the local
machine, but your config looks like it should work (does local 'tftp'
work?, that would be a good test, if not then something is wrong with
your UDP.) Also, make sure the talk daemon (talkd) is running as it
is what glues connections together tho it doesn't sound like this is
the problem.

The problems with talk are (some are not really talk):

	1. It is full of byte order difficulties, TALK on a VAX
	cannot speak with TALK on a SUN (for example.) Some people
	have cleaned this up.

	2. If you are running 4.2bsd right out of 'the box' then
	your 4.2 probably has the udp checksum bug which will further
	frustrate attempts to speak non-locally to anything but another
	machine with the same (self-consistent) bug.

	3. If you talk to a machine through a gateway and there's another
	way back the return path for the talk daemon often finds the other
	way and they can't get the conversation going. At least I'm pretty
	sure that's what one of my systems people was telling me was the
	problem a while back, not sure.

SOOO...what's the solution?

There's a public domain program, 'phone', which does about the same thing
(better, I believe it supports multi-way conversations), doesn't have
the byte order problems etc.

If you want it I could pack it up and mail it to you. We gave up on
talk a while ago. As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I'm
going to delete talk and link the command to phone as we get someone
going crazy every so often because they unwittingly ran talk.

(I did not write phone, just offering to send my copy, it was distributed
in the USENET sources distribution so I'm sure it's freely distributeable.)


	-Barry Shein, Boston University