Hey everyone,

Right now I'm trying to use TALK to chat with a user on my system. From reading forums and doing google, the TALK command seems very easy to use but I seem to always run into trouble. I would type:

"talk blahblah@localhost" and it would spit out:

Error on read from talk daemon: Connection refused. Press any key....
[Checking for invitation on caller's machine]

Am I not setting something up? I went under /etc/xinetd.d and editted the talk file from "disable=yes" to "disable=no" and restarted the xine service but that still didn't solve my problem.

Any suggestions? Thanx for any help!

-twantrd

Oh sorrie, I forgot to mention that I have redhat 7.3

-twantrd

You mean you restarted the xinetd daemon right? Not xine.

Yea I restarted the xine daemon...

when i type in "talk <username>"

it says "unknown host"

So i'm assuming talkd does not recognize my hostname. Anyway to fix this? Thanx for any help...

-twantrd

Not entirely sure what xine is... But you need to be restarting your xinetd..

Anyway, your problem is that you've only half enabled talk. You also need to edit your /etc/xinetd.d/ntalk file, and enable that aswell.

If you don't have an ntalk file you need to install the talkd daemon - probably listed as 'talk server'.

The reason you're getting the 'connection refused' is that when you 'talk' - it contacts a 'connection manager' which recieves your request and passes it onto the other user. The other user can then accept or reject your request, and it's all handled by talkd.

If you don't have talkd : disabled=no, then your talk request (talk <username>) ends up trying to contact a service that isn't running and your 'connection is refused'.

So :

1) edit /etc/xinetd.d/ntalk - disabled =no
2) service xinetd restart
3) talk <mybuddy>



Slick.