Ross,
Yes, I have a suggestion. Don't use talk. The talk protocol is really
ugly and confusing, and relies on both TCP and UDP traffic going in
both directions. It's also not very efficient as it sends each
character as it is typed. If you're looking for a reasonable bit of
software for text-based communications, I'd recommend setting up an IRC
server and letting the users connect to it with an IRC client of some
kind.
Now, you mentioned that you were trying to use "ntalk", which doesn't
suffer from all the terrible problems of "talk", but I'd still shy away
from it.
Things to look for: is messaging to your terminal allowed? (mesg y),
is the daemon process running? are firewall rules arranged to let the
talk requests and responses through? (that's probably the one that's
getting you).
Good luck.
-jan-
--
Jan L. Peterson
Unemployed "Computer Facilitator"
http://www.peterson.ath.cx/~jlp/resume.html
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