GSMILLER@MTUS5.BITNET (06/18/91)
Does anyone have an explicit description of the BSD 'Talk' mechanism? More specifically, does anyone either have a definition for it, or can tell me whether the Sun version of Talk differs from the mainstream BSD version? The reason I ask is that I'm attempting to implement a Sun-compatible 'talk'. Before one can do this, a definition of the protocol is necessary. My first thought was to check to see if there was an RFC covering it. I checked, and was rather suprised to find that there wasn't. Next, I grabbed the BSD sources for 'talk' and 'talkd' from somewhere (uunet?), and analyzed them. There seemed to be easily enough information there for me to work off of (reluctantly) - so I created a little udp daemon to wait on the talk port - and report what kind of packets it received. To my suprise, the packets it received did -not- match that defined in the BSD source. (Specifically, I attempted a talk session from a Sun to my machine - the Sun sent a request to my machine, checking to see if an invitation awaited it.) Apparently, most (if not all) of the same data was there - but mostly in different places. Now, before I go trying to reverse-engineer the whole thing - perhaps someone knows a little about the protocol that they can share? Thanks! - Greg GSMILLER@MTUS5.BITNET (gsmiller@mtu.edu)