| ---------------------------------------- | |
| talkd fixes in ubuntu 20.04 | |
| October 11th, 2020 | |
| ---------------------------------------- | |
| 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! |