Re: Problems with Talk under Debian

[Gerry Jensen <gerry@trans1.com>]

On Sat, 21 Dec 1996, John Goerzen wrote:

> I have been having problems with talk and ytalk under Linux.  Any help would
> be greatly appreciated!

I had trouble with this too.  I believe one problem is that the host name
of your machine must match the IP address of your machine.  Otherwise,
other talk daemons won't talk to you.  If you are given a dynamic IP
address by your ISP, then it almost certainly doesn't match.  So, you must
set the host name of your machine to match the given IP number after you
establish your PPP/SLIP connection.  You can set it with the "hostname"
command.  I have the following line in /etc/ppp/ip-up to do this for me
automatically whenever I establish a PPP connection: 

  /bin/hostname `/usr/bin/host $4 | head -1 | cut -f 2 -d " "`

Also, reverse name lookup must be set up correctly by whomever is in
charge of your domain (probably your ISP).  Otherwise, you will not be
able to initiate a talk connection, although I think you can still reply
if someone else initiates the talk session with you. 

And lastly, Sun's talk seems to be incompatible with just about every
other OS's talk that I've tried, including Linux.  So, if you're trying to
talk to someone on a Sun, you're probably SOL.  It would be nice if
someone would hack the talk that comes with Linux so that it could talk to
Suns as well.  

Gerry
gerry@trans1.com


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