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:
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1998/06/msg00582.html
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1998/06/msg00587.html
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?
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.