NAME

ntalkd − remote user communication server

SYNOPSIS

/usr/sbin/ntalkd

DESCRIPTION

Ntalkd is the server that notifies a user that somebody else wants to initiate a conversation.  It acts a repository of invitations, responding to requests by clients wishing to rendezvous to hold a conversation.  In normal operation, a client, the caller, initiates a rendezvous by sending a CTL_MSG to the server of type LOOK_UP (see <protocols/talkd.h>). This causes the server to search its invitation tables to check if an invitation currently exists for the caller (to speak to the callee specified in the message). If the lookup fails, the caller then sends an ANNOUNCE message causing the server to broadcast an announcement on the callee’s login ports requesting contact. When the callee responds, the local server uses the recorded invitation to respond with the appropriate rendezvous address and the caller and callee client programs establish a stream connection through which the conversation takes place.

SEE ALSO

talk(1), write(1)

BUGS

It uses a new protocol, which is incompatible with the talk(1) and talkd(8C) released with 4.2BSD.

4.3 Berkeley Distribution  —  Revision 1.3 of 04/07/90