barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) (09/29/89)
Is there any documentation for the protocol used by talk/talkd in SunOS
4.0.3. The only thing the man page says is that it's
architecture-dependent. I'd like to write an implementation for another
machine that is compatible with the Suns.
I've got the source to the 4.3bsd talkd, which I suspect is what SunOS 3.5
used (the architecture dependence is presumably due to byte order
problems). But SunOS 3.5 machines can't talk to SunOS 4.0.x machines, so
it appears that Sun changed the protocol in between. Barry Margolin,
Thinking Machines Corp.
barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmarfeldman@boris.Tymnet.COM (Steve Feldman) (09/30/89)
Actually, Sun used the 4.2bsd talk program, which had byte-order dependencies in the protocol. In 4.3bsd, talk was modified to use network byte ordering in the protocol, making it machine independent. It uses a different UDP port number also. Unfortunately, Sun never adopted this version. There are two ways you could go: 1) Port the 4.3 talk program to the sun. I did this once a long time ago, and it wasn't too hard. 2) Modify the 4.2 talk program (in /usr/src/old on the 4.3 distribution) to use network byte order. I've never tried this. Steve Feldman Tymnet
tinguely@uunet.uu.net (Markie) (10/02/89)
In article <1784@brazos.Rice.edu> barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes: >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 143, message 8 of 10 > >Is there any documentation for the protocol used by talk/talkd in SunOS >4.0.3. Sun OS uses the old talk protocol used with BSD 4.2, where the talk and talkd sources on uunet.uu.net (/bsd-sources/src/network/talk[d].tar.Z) is the 4.3 talk protocol (called ntalk in the inetd.conf). I wish Sun (Sequent, Encore and other BSD 4.2 based OS vendors) would update to the 4.3 networking programs, so we don't need to keep two protocols. The 4.3 programs may need the talk.h in the include directory. Mark Tinguely North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105 UUCP: ...!uunet!ndsuvax!nctingue BITNET: nctingue@ndsuvax.bitnet INTERNET: nctingue@plains.NoDak.edu