---------------------------------------- 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!