talk, ntalk, ytalk

On the student cluster talk, ytalk, and ntalk are all the same program so it doesn't matter which one you run.

First figure out which machine they're on, finger or finger @machine.name usually works.

<ux9> home 1$ ytalk jgross@ux9.cso.uiuc.edu

Message from Ntalk_Daemon@ux8.cso.uiuc.edu at 22:29 ...  
ntalk: connection requested by jgross@ux8.cso.uiuc.edu.  
ntalk: respond with:  ntalk jgross@ux8.cso.uiuc.edu      

<ux8> home 1$ ytalk jgross@ux9.cso.uiuc.edu

---------------------------= YTalk version 3.0 (2) =----------------------------
                           #       Main Menu        #
                           #                        #
                           # a: add a user          #
                           # d: delete a user       #
                           # o: options             #
                           # s: shell               #
                           # u: user list           #
                           # w: output user to file #
                           # q: quit                #
                           ##########################

Just (a)dd a new user and enter them at the prompt.

Should you want to log your conversation (w) output the user to a file.

Other runtime options are available through the (o)ptions menu.

To keep changing options every time you can turn on or off options in your .ytalkrc. Some usefull ones include:

turn X off: If you're using X it keeps the stupid seperate boxes from filling your screen.
turn word-wrap on: Makes word wrap lines just like on a word processor.
turn scrolling on: Makes the user scroll instead of starting at the top again

Why this won't work:

students.uiuc.edu is actually and alias for ux(4,5,7,8,9) and will only hit each machine one fifth of the time.

Even though you can send email to it, uiuc.edu is not a real machine but just an email forwarding system.

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