Lo there,
I'm curious about talk versus ntalk, and NetBSD's implementation of them.
I'm assuming that both protocols are sent via the /usr/bin/talk command. I
know alerady that Sun has screwed them up for years....but yet I'm trying
to connect to a Sun (well, a couple of them). My wife's school has had a
screwed up talk daemon for years...I used to get around it by forking off
my own talk daemon from ~/.login (of course, I didn't bother with an
appropriate kill in ~/.logout). Ntalk always worked well, though. I just
tried connecting between my Alpha & her school's Sun & here was the result:

Sun calling Alpha with talk .....no response from mesg
Sun calling alpha with ntalk ....Alpha blinks and tells me to talk her@Sun

Alpha calls Sun with ntalk ....ntalk is cmd not found
Alpha calls Sun with talk .....Sun blinks and tells her to ntalk me@alpha

Telnetting into my ISP's UnixWare machine & trying with that....there's no
ntalk there either, and both directions talk just fine.


Now, a buddy of mine just started at university & has a Sun to play with.
He's no un*x user by any means, but is an engineering student, so they get
to play with compsci stuff. I told him to "talk" me, & he says that it just
keeps waiting for invitation on remote machine (the same thing my wife's
school computer does). So, I told him to try ntalk, but that's not found on
the system. I told him edit his ~/.login file to add mesg y in it to see if
that'll let me talk to him, but that was just today.

Basically, my understanding is this:
NetBSD has 2 separate programs that listen for connections,
/usr/libexec/ntalk and /usr/bin/talk. But, /usr/libexec/ntalk uses
/usr/bin/talk as its user interface agent, so that the user only needs to
know one command for either protocol. Is that correct?

Is there any fix for me connecting with talk to a Sun, or should I try to
use something else...I'm running a talker and a MUD, so it's not that big
of a deal, but the beep & flashing is nice for getting attention.

Is there something I'm missing, or doies Solaris just suck moose balls?

Mike
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.