[TriLUG] ack ... "talk" doesn't work on seawolf

Randy Dees randy at deesfamily.com
Sun Aug 19 14:20:25 EDT 2001


> > netstat -an | grep 517  # talk  (UDP)
> > and
> > netstat -an | grep 518  # ntalk (UDP)
> >
> > to determine if either port is being listened to.
> 
> but both talk and ntalk, although they show up in the output of
> netstat, have a blank "State" field at the end of the line.
> i'm not sure what this means.  that they're both running, but
> neither are listening?

Try running talk in debug mode with -d.  According to man talkd, that writes
to /var/log/talkd.log.  The blank state is normal; UDP is a stateless protocol.

While you are at it, try logging packets to that port with tcpdump on both the 
machines.  If packets are being sent but not received, you have a problem with
firewalling even though it didn't look like it.

talkd also has an option to log packets, but I would rather use tcpdump to make
sure packets are getting through.





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