On Wed, 11 Oct 1995, Julian Bean wrote:

> Well, I can add to this story, although not neccessarily helpfully -
> 
> We have a couple of SS20s at work, running Sol 2.4/Openwindows, and my
> Sun3, running NetBSD.  I have a friend on a remote site, who uses various
> machine, normally SPARCs of some kind.
> 
> Talk/ytalk are very erratic - they do sometimes work, but sometimes they
> erroneously report that 'the user is not logged on' (ytalk error message.
> talk just quits out).  At other time they will loop "looking for
> invitation" or sometimes quit with "target machine does not recognise us".
> On average they work about 1 time in 5.
> 

I think the problem may well be with SunOS 4.x.  talk on these machines 
is not entirely compatible with ntalk or ytalk.  This was fixed in 
Solaris 2.3 and upwards.  The sources for ntalk and ytalk are readily 
available however, so a simple change is required to /etc/inetd.conf on 
the Suns to make them compatible.

I think SGI's are similarly somewhat incompatible, but ytalk/ntalk between 
any two machines should work ok.

Hope that's of some help.....just my experience of the joys of SunOS ;-)

Steve


PS I just ordered a Mac LC475 'cos it was cheap and I had to sell my IIci 
when I moved from England.  Is there any chance that NetBSD will work on 
this machine yet?

 ________________________________________________________________________
| ( () )       Dr Steve Eyles         |    21 Hallock Street, Apt 17     |
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