From: fenner@cmf.nrl.navy.mil (William C Fenner) Subject: Re: Getting talkd to work with Suns Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1993 00:57:48 GMT
In article <1993Aug9.200819.5097@nstn.ns.ca>,
Hai Pham <pham@px1.stfx.ca> wrote:
>As far as I can tell,
>the problem comes from some funny talk protocol that Sun uses, but no one
>else does.
Correct. Sun still supplies the old talk client and daemon programs
with SunOS and Solaris. The old talk programs were written when all
the world was a VAX, and you didn't have to worry about silly little
things like network transparency between different architectures.
The folly of old talk was seen quickly, thus the ntalk protocol was
designed, and using ntalk anyone can talk to anyone. Sun, however,
neglected to notice the rest of the world, just like they still use
foo.0 as the default broadcast address. [Actually, this is fixed in
Solaris 2.x . Yee haw.]
If you really want to talk to the people on the Suns, get them to
install ntalk (or they can use ytalk to talk to you).
Bill
-- Bill Fenner fenner@cmf.nrl.navy.mil