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From: GSMILLER@MTUS5.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: The SunOS version of Talk
Message-ID: <91169.103948GSMILLER@MTUS5.BITNET>
Date: 18 Jun 91 15:39:48 GMT
Organization: Computing Technology Services, Michigan Technological Univ.
Lines: 28


 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)