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talkd fixes in ubuntu 20.04 | |
October 11th, 2020 | |
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When cosmic voyage updated to ubuntu 20.04 subtle things broke | |
that I didn't notice right away. One of these was talk(1). We were | |
using ytalk(1) as the program of choice back in 18.10, but that | |
seems to no longer be in apt. I reinstalled it from source and was | |
hopeful that it would do the trick. Not so much. | |
I fought this for an hour tonight with a very patient voyager | |
helping me out. I tried closing out of mosh and tmux to narrow | |
down the issue. Eventually I got a clue from the error message in | |
syslog. | |
talkd[411722]: 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1): unintelligible packet | |
I had a lot of these messages and they eventually got me to | |
a redhat bug report that suggested removing the inetd entry for | |
talkd would fix it. I commented that out and left the ntalkd line | |
in place. | |
I also fixed a thing that bugged me from back in the day. The | |
nobody user had been configured to be a part of the tty group and | |
I was using it in that inetd line. That felt dirty since nobody | |
shouldn't have access to anything. | |
sudo useradd -c 'in.talkd User' \ | |
-d /nonexistent \ -s /usr/sbin/nologin \ | |
-r -g tty talk | |
So I added a 'talk' user, gave it the proper access, and swapped | |
inetd to use that instead. Then I gave it a kick (restart the | |
process) and things are working again. Whew! |