Tuesday, February 29, 2000
Life in Unixland
ytalk
doesn't work on linus (my home system). Nor does
talk.
Strange, I have it enabled, but it just isn't working and
it seems to be horribly damaged.
This is Unix. So what else is new?
Seriously. There are at least two different talk
protocols,
neither one documented (unless you count source code to be usuable
documentation, much like uuencode
when you get down to it) and both
incompatible with each other. Which is why ytalk
is nice—it
preportedly talks both so it doesn't matter.
Only it's not working.
Over the years I've found it harder and harder to find working
implementations of *talk
on any system but I did have a working
version I could use to talk to a few friends with before the install of
RedHat 5.2 on linus (it was running RedHat 5.0 before).
Now it's general braindamage all over the place.
In trying to debug the problem, I found that /etc/inetd.conf
had a
bogus entry for dtalk
(whatever that is) so I commented it out.
Still didn't work. Uncomment telnet
on the advice of
Mark to see if
inetd
is okay.
telnet
isn't working. What the … ? I try killing off
inetd
and restarting it. Same deal.
Is it possible for a newer release to exhibit so much lossage? That isn't a Microsoft product?
Try re-enabling FTP.
Same lossage.
Turns out I had neglected to install TCP-wrappers. Nice that the RedHat install program neglected to make a dependancy on that. But it includes Perl. Goes out of its way to include Perl.
Such is life in Unixland.
I should note that I get easily upset when stuff that should work doesn't. Computers don't have to be this difficult. There shouldn't be this much lossage and braindeath in dealing with computers. But I suspect that most programmers can't cope with such ideas. Programmers give programming a bad name.