One would think that as long as I've been around Grex, I wouldn't have som
so many dumb q.s-
Some one was trying to respond to my talk request, and gave me the message
that my settings were denying talk.  
One- how do I change that
Two- how could that have happened w/o "staff access?"
Thanks-

22 responses total.

I'll take a guess and use the Gre catch-all phrase,
"talk and ntalk are broken, they may not work."

This response has been erased.

Thanks folks-
Just in case I do want to shut someone out, how do I do that?

The Unix command "mesg N" will turn off your message
flag, *and* disconnect anyone who's trying to talk to you.
"mesg n" (lower case) will turn off the flag, but not
disconnect anyone who is already talking to you.

And mesg y turns it back on...
Why do you say ntalk is broken. I know that talk doesn't work, but I use
ntalk all the time out of grex.

ntalk is broken in a very nasty way, much nastier than if it
never worked.  It works *some* of them time.  I've never seen
a pattern to when it would and wouldn't work, maybe there's  a
randomizing element in the program or something.  ntalk works
once in a while, to get your hopes up, and dash them to the
ground that much harder when it doesn't work...

It just worked perfectly fine for me.

Well I guess I'm lucky. I've never had a problem with it.

And I used talk this Sat. morn.  Glitches & Bugs

Would it be a good idea to put a wrapper script around ntalk explaining
the problems?  That might result in less confusion, but it would also slow
it down for those who can get it to work.

This response has been erased.

Here's another one: When someone is trying to communicate w. you, you only
get the "message on tty."  How do you know which format to reply in, or is
the final mode of communication that chosen by the respondant?

If it says "Message from robh on ttyh3..." it's a write request,
and you should reply with write.

If it says "Message from Talk_Daemon@grex at..." it's a talk
request, and you should reply with talk.  Or ntalk.  Or even
ytalk.

You can try responding with the other one, but the programs
won't work together unless both of you are running the same one.

"Message from robh on ttyh3" could be chat as well.  It works perfectly
well for one person to be chatting somebody, while the person who's being
chatted is writing the person who's chatting them.  The problem with this,
of course, is that that usually has each person talking in the way they
like to be talked to, but being talked to the other way.

Last I heard, "chat" was "write" with the -c option turned on.
I don't even think the two are stored as different programs.

(robh checkes /usr/local/bin)

Nope, chat is a link to write.  They're *exactly* the same program.

Correct.  I think the program checks whether it was invoked as "chat"
or "write", and turns the -c option on in the former case.

Thanks folks-
Maybe this isn't the best place to mention this, and I think that it
it's come up before, but there's so much undocumented stuff on Grex, we
ought to slap together a user's manual and sell it for $5 -$10., make some
money.  I've been using Grex for almost two years and I know almost nothing
because I get by on the minimum I need at  any time.  If I had an array of
all the features in front of me, I'd probably have a much richer "grex-life."

This response has been erased.

Why can some nonmembers use the Talk program with me and others can't.

Are some of them using a different command or what?

Another digression: lately I've had several logins where ^S and ^Q didn't 
function to control scrolling-
any insight on what causes this, whether it can be fixed w.o. logging off and
logging back on?
Brother Bill-

Bill, there's one *very* likely cause.  If you're on via one of the
high-speed lines, Grex may be responding to the ^S - but have already sent
tons of stuff to the modem, which is not using that kind of flow control
with you (for very good reasons).  Unfortunately, there's not a really
good solution.  Use more or less to limit your output to an amount you
can handle - that's about the best.  Use an emulator with a big scrollback
buffer.

This response has been erased.

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

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