Hi,
I usually have "mesg y" in the interactive section of my login scripts so
that people may "talk" or "ytalk" to me when I am interactively using that
login [cf "mesg n" for remote batch jobs].
On my new vanilla Mandrake 8.2\beta2 install mesg y fails in bash, tcsh
etc at all times. The error is:
"mesg: error: tty device is not owned by group `tty'" and sure enough
/dev/pts/? is owned by user.user not user.tty; mesg n is fine
however.
Furthermore, I see in /etc/xinetd.d/{,n}talk that the group is set to
"tty" [these are both provided by talk-server-0.17-6mdk, this package
seems to have talk file links for every ntalk file + an additional
/etc/xinetd.d/talk config file]
I had thought that changing disable=yes to no and SIGHUP'ing xinetd would
enable talk support but it does not seem to work [connection refused]. I
tried restarting xinetd, and sure enough "talk" is not "removed" in the
logs and should therefore work. It was not until I did the same for ntalk
that I got the "refusing messages" line. When I further chown q.tty
/dev/pts/? talk started to work. I am not familiar with whichever package
is setting up the ownership of /dev/pts sockets and whether such a change
is a security risk.
talk-0.17-6mdk.src.rpm explicitly makes two xinetd.d conf files in the
server rpm, but the changelog was last editted 1 year ago. This is true
on x86 too. The redhat HPC nodes in the office only have one copy.
My inclination is a bug in talk-server spec is duplicating the files so
that both /etc/xinetd.d/{,n}talk have to be editted to get the same daemon
/usr/sbin/in.talkd->/usr/sbin/in.ntalkd to run, and that something is
getting the wrong ownership of /dev/pts/?.
Anyone have ideas what is going on/supposed to be going on?
Q.
I would like to thank Stew for all the work that he has put into the
distro. My Wallstreet is back in business after some horrible keymapping
problems in 8.0 [I lost the arrow keys, and had utterly different keycodes
in X and console], pcmcia is looking good, XFree4.2 is wonderful,
emacs-nox-21 is ace for remote console editting. Thanks again.
