Re: talk/talkd on solaris 2.8

[Michael Weiser]

On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Alain Magloire wrote:

>   Sorry for the delay, almost miss this.
Not a problem, i'm very busy most of the time, too.

> > I needed some ntalk client/server for Solaris 2.8 since Sun only supports
> > talk by default. After some searching the talk/talkd from inetutils seemed
> > best suited for me and I installed 'em. They compiled okay but I needed
> > the attached patch to make client and server finallay work correctly:
> Was this patch against the latest cvs tree? or snapshot?
As you can see from the filenames it's against snapshot 20010209 from
alpha.gnu.org.

> anonymous CVS.  Set your CVSROOT string to:
>
> :pserver:address@hidden:/gd/gnu/anoncvsroot
>
> Hit enter when prompted for a password
>
> issue:
>
> cvs co inetutils.
I'll try ASAP.

[utmp vs. utmpx]
> Yes, this is very annoying, utmp vs utmpx can become such a pain grrr...!!
> I thing, I will go for utmpx solely and provide a converter utmp_to_utmpx
> for platforms not having utmpx
Might be possible. On the other side Solaris *has* support for utmp, it's
just not used any more. So I could also have just reactivated that utmp in
some way and used that with talkd. The definitive approach would be IMHO
to have dynamic utmp/utmpx selection at run or compile time via a command
line switch, configure option or such, so that you have both options and
can select based on your needs. For example: I also have some black NeXT
boxes running NeXTstep 3.3 and would be surprised if they already have
utmpx.

> > This again messed up libinetutils/ttymsg.h since pseudo ttys are
> > /dev/pts/<number> on Solaris which makes ttymsg refuse to print something
> > on it since it includes a /. I changed that to accept slashed but check
> > the final path to be a character device which seems equally secure to me.
> I'll will take a look later.
I think there might arraise a problem on current Linux or other
commericial systems, too, since anyone currently moves towards UN*X98 ptys
which reside at /dev/pts/[0-9]+.

BTW: Linux NetKit ntalkd doesn't do any checking on the filename. :-\

> If it possible can you do the patch against the latest snapshot.
> I'm not sure against what the patch is, and the code was change
> recently.  Let me know.
See above. I'll sync up ASAP and give you feedback. Might take till next
week since I'm on some sort of holidays now. :)

Thanks for your feedback!
-- 
bye, Micha