Ok, I admit, I don't know a lot about some things, but when I do a finger
command and get something like this:

Login       Name              TTY Idle    When    Where
jingle   Karen Dziegeleski    *h0   17 Mon 22:22  remote secure
gerund   Gerald E. Peck       *h1      Mon 23:36  remote secure
rcurl    Rane Curl             h2    4 Mon 23:16  remote secure
bap      Bruce Allen Price    *h3      Tue 00:04  remote secure
omni     The Winnemucca Kid   *h5      Mon 23:42  remote secure

shouldn't the `*' by h1 NOT be present when I have mesg set to y?
It seems that it is always there, no matter how I have my perms set.
Also, when I do a !f gerund it says messages off, even though my perms are
on.  Is this a bug or am I just confused?

22 responses total.

Possibly this is related to scg's problems setting mesg to y.

Is it possible for people to chat you when you set "mesg y", in spite
of what finger says?  It should be.

It's not a bug so much as an incompatibility.  The finger program on
the Sun-3 uses the traditional Unix method of determining chat permission,
namely the permissions on your tty device special file, /dev/ttyh?.
The mesg and chat programs on Grex are custom programs, not stock Unix,
that use a decidedly non-traditional method:  A separate file that
records each logged-in user's message permission.  Mesg updates the
file rather than changing permissions on your tty device, and chat
looks in the file to decide whether to allow writes to you or not.
The chat program uses root powers to override the /dev/ttyh?
permissions, which should always be set to "rw-------".

Finger on the Sun-2 was aware of the non-standard message permission
setup and reported permissions correctly, but the finger on the Sun-3
is not.  It's one of the various things that needs to be fixed eventually.

OIC.
Well, actually I can be written to, I was just wondering why it said I
couldn't be.  I mean if a person saw the * they might think I was unavailable
to chat when in fact it wasn't so.

Yes, that is a problem, and needs to be fixed.

Does offsite talk work?
Someone can talk me at jared@m-net.arbornet.org to test it sometime when the
link is up.

As far as I can tell (having tried a couple of times, most recently two seconds
ago), Grex doesn't have a talk-daemon that can be accessed remotely. Is there
any chance of getting a "talk" program that can use the internet link?

I would like this too.

It's on my list. SUn comes with a brain-damaged "talk" daemon that doesn't
grok byte-swapping. So a talk daemon running on a box with a motorola
processor(68020, 68030) etc, won't talk to a talk client on a box with an Intel
processor. We need to get and build ntalk.

Where does one get that?

probably somewhere on uunet.

#8:     I just tried to talk to a friend on ml7694a.leonard.american.edu, which
is a Mac with a 68020 processor, and it didn't work.  He says he always has
it set up to accept talk, so the problem isn't on his end.  If talk can handle
Mortorola processors, why wouldn't this work?

Indeed. My son at Cornell, Jeremy (aka fireball) has a Mac which
runs a talk daemon. This is a Motorola 68040.

If I telnet to my other son's DecStation, I can talk to Jeremy from
there, but I can't do it from Grex. If I'm not mistaken
byte-swapping doesn't come into play on a 68020, 68040, or MIPS
processor.

I think the talk *client* is brain damaged here. It doesn't seem to
grok any network address.

Duh! <gregc slaps self in forehead>

We have a suite of programs: write, chat, talk, mesg, amin, finger, talk
That were all either written or modified by someone(Jan wolters?) a few
years ago. These programs are all inter-related and they share a non-standard
method of determining if a user wants messages or not. All of these programs
do not have any idea about networks. Most of them were simply copied across
from the Sun-2 to the Sun-3. They live in /usr/local/bin. Their standard
SunOS counterparts live in /usr/ucb. We have already renamed the finger
program to grexold_finger so that just typing "finger" finds the one in
/usr/ucb, but you are still getting the old Sun-2 "talk" if you have 
/usr/local/bin early in your path. Try explicitly running /usr/ucb/talk
and see how that works.

The "talk" suggestion worked! I tried talking to myself at my IP address
(not the Merit one I'd logged in from, but the ORIGINAL) and it worked!
However, it's still only outgoing "talk"; I tried to call myself here from
there, with no success. Any way for the Grex talk-daemon to pay attention to
uninvited remote talk invitations? I guess waiting for the stable internet
link would be the thing to do first...

BTW, the address I called FROM can't telnet to Grex either. Could that be a
factor, i.e., if I had called myself from Merit, would Grex have heard it?

Yeah, alot of external addresses are still disallowed. We havn't opened
up incoming TCP connections, ie: telnet, rlogin, ftp, finger, talk, etc, yet.
That's still in the future.

That seems to be variable. I telnetted in Tuesday, and I have ftp'd in
the past. I haven' asked what the factors are that allow it one day and
not another.

This response has been erased.

I actually got a remote talk session to work, and was able to talk to a friend
in Washington who I hadn't seen since mid summer!  It was cool, except that the
link crashed in the middle. :(

(or at one ++end++ or the other?)

At our end, before gregc fixed the reliability problem.

This is not really about a bug, but it's about finger, and I didn't want
to start a new topic:

Question: When you do a finger and get the list of people who are online, and 
what they are doing, what does the little astarisk next the tty number mean?

It means that the individual has turned off write permissions.
In other words-- you can't chat or write them via chat or !write.

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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss