talkd
—
remote user communication server
The talkd
utility is the server that notifies a user
that someone else wants to initiate a conversation. It acts as 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.
The talkd
utility appeared in
4.3BSD.