Hello, I created a patch for this RFE: http://www.loria.fr/~glisse/tmp/6494178.diff
Basically the way in.talkd works is that it uses the first tty in utmpx that belongs to the right user. This tty may not be writeable. In this patch I modify the loop that looks for the first tty that belongs to the right user to make it find the first one that has the group write permission. I tried to make the patch as minor as possible to make it unlikely to break anything. There is already some code duplication between process.c and announce.c, and this slightly increases it. Refactoring the code would make for a cleaner solution, but it is more work, both to make and to review. An other solution would be for in.talkd to run as user talkd and group tty, this way a tty not being writable would probably make the current code try the next tty, but that is also more complicated than adding a simple stat (need to check exactly what privileges in.talkd needs) (besides, I tried modifying the manifest file, but in.talkd was still started root:root). I tested the patched in.talkd on S10U1 by simply substituting it to the original /usr/sbin/in.talkd (plus the appropriate svcadm disable/enable talk). When I talk a user who is not logged in, I get "[Your party is not logged on]". When I talk a user whose ttys are all "mesg y", it works. When I talk a user whose ttys are all "mesg n", I get "[Your party is refusing messages]". Now the only case that differs between the original version and mine: when I talk a user who has some ttys with "mesg n" and some with "mesg y", my version always finds one of the "mesg y" ttys whereas the original one often answers "refusing messages". I do not have a contributor agreement yet (currently trying to figure out who is supposed to sign it), I don't know if it is necessary for such a short patch. This message posted from opensolaris.org
