[KLUG Members] talk replacement

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Back when I had a public IP and ran a server, I enjoyed talking to my
> users using the "talk" and the multi user "ytalk" programs.  Now we've
> all gone our seperate ways and still keep in touch with AIM and IRC.  We
> liked the imedacy of talk, however, the "once you've said it, you've
> said it" aspect. 
> For the KLUG members who are not familure with "talk," the letters you
> type are sent as you type them, as opposed to AIM and IRC where you
> write a whole lines and then hit "send" and email where you write whole
> passages and send them.  It's really a lot like talking to somone in
> person. 

Yep, I've actually used talk.  But it wasn't really much more than a
brutally primitive UI wrapped around the functionality of something like
netcat.  It isn't very well suited to the modern Internet.

> My question is, though, does anyone know of a IM protocol or program
> that doesn't require remote-login (via ssh or telnet) that is real-time,
> and perferably cross-platform (namely Linux, Mac OSx, Windows, in that
> order)?

I'm afraid Jabber/XMPP has really taken over his space.  (The sending of
long string verses individual characters is drastically more efficient,
especially on high latency lines.  If you send each character that is 52
+ 1 + [other overhead] bytes every keystroke.  Not even telnet actually
does this anymore [see "Nagle"])

 But you can get what you want, or very nearly.

The other side runs a utility called sock on a port and you telnet to
that port,  it will feel very much like talk except he other side then
needs to the same but in reverse.

sock is actually very handy.  For instance, we run "sock -dl noor:9000
-e -v /usr/local/sbin/portTextToPDF.sh" and an Cisco access server, when
DTR goes high initiates a telnet to noor:9000, sending everything that
comes in over the serial port over the network, and closes the
connection when DTR drops.   All that information in passed as standard
input to the named script which in this case converts the text stream to
a PDF and posts it as an attachment into an IMAP folder.   You can use
sock to very simply build your own primitive network applications, as
simple as -

#!/bin/sh
cat > /tmp/$$.9000.text
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z`
LINES=`wc -l /tmp/$$.9000.text | cut -f1 -d" "`
if [ $LINES -lt 10 ]; then
  exit 1;
 fi;
cat /tmp/$$.9000.text | \
  a2ps -1 -R \
       --header="Industrial Battery Load Test Results" \
       --footer="Cisco Inc. http://www.cisco-inc.com" \
       --title="Captured Async Data: $TIMESTAMP" \
       --stdin="Captured Async Data: $TIMESTAMP" \
       --output=- - | ps2pdf13 - /tmp/async$TIMESTAMP.noor9000.pdf
echo "
The attached PDF document contains asyncronous data captured
from NOOR:tcp/9000 at $TIMESTAMP.

NOOR:tcp/9000 is the \"Cisco Wyoming Industrial Battery Load Tester\"

NOTE: The attached PDF requires a PDF reader with PDF version
1.3 support or greater; this includes Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0
and later.

" | mail -s "Captured Async Data $TIMESTAMP" -a /tmp/async
$TIMESTAMP.noor9000.pdf XXXXX at XXXXXX
rm -f /tmp/$$.9000.text  /tmp/async$TIMESTAMP.noor9000.pdf
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