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I am trying to use talk to communicate between two computers. One of them runs debian jessie, another runs freebsd.

I have succeeded in establishing a talk connection from debian to frebsd. However the opposite direction results in:

[No connection yet]
[Your party is refusing messages]

I researched this and came upon these posts:

Apparently, talkd on debian does not accept connections if there is no login for the user in question via telnet/ssh. To sum up:

  • I log in on the console and startx -> cannot connect via talk
  • I open another virtual terminal and log in again -> cannot connect via talk
  • I ssh into the debian box from freebsd box -> can connect via talk

At this point talk is pretty useless. If I have to ssh into the box to use it, I might just get whatever I need done via ssh.

Is there another talkd that works when the target user only has an X session, or a way to configure ntalkd to work in this scenario?

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    What are you using talk for? Is this for chatting or as a backend message service? Jan 23, 2014 at 16:25
  • Try typing mesg y
    – user130370
    Jan 23, 2014 at 16:35
  • Also I was able to connect via talk once I had an ssh connection going, per the description.
    – Ivan
    Jan 23, 2014 at 16:39
  • At this point talk is pretty useless -- talk was created over 20 years ago and very few people use it anymore. It was 'made useless' by superior technologies in the last decade. Don't expect too much out of it. I don't know why OSes still ship with it, but the FreeBSD developers sometimes hold on to old things. Jan 24, 2014 at 19:07

1 Answer 1

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Sounds like a limitation of the Debian talk daemon, based on your research.

You can either:

  1. Hack the Debian talk daemon to recognize any active TTY as "logged in and available for talk"
  2. Try compiling the FreeBSD talk daemon on Debian
    (I don't know what the "logged in and available" semantics are for FreeBSD's talk daemon)
  3. Use another solution (IRC? Jabber?)

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