Problem: After upgrading from RedHat 5.2 to 6.0, I found that ytalk would allways hang and would not get any connection Solution: Uninstalling the talk package and installing the ntalk package from RedHat 5.2 cured the problem for me. No changes were needed to the ytalk package.
We had the same problem. We solved the problem by doing an rpm -e ytalk, installing Redhat's SRPM, rebuilding the ytalk rpm with rpm -bb and installing the new RPM. Everything seems to work fine now.
I was incorrect in my previous statement. A recompile has no effect on the hanging of ytalk. Both in.talkd and in.ntalkd seem to fight over ytalk connections. Commenting out the in.talkd line and leaving the in.ntalkd line active makes ytalk behave normally.
I thought I should reword my previous incomprehensible message... When a ytalk process hangs, both a in.talkd and in.ntalk can be observed running on the destination machine. The only way we could stop ytalk from hanging was to comment out the in.talkd line in inetd.conf (leaving in.ntalkd active).
I logged a duplicate bug yesterday.. Note that even when you disable in.talkd, and get it working through in.ntalkd, there is still a bug. When a talk session terminates, the in.ntalkd process is left hanging around. This also needs fixing. The severity, "normal" sounds wrong to - the whole talk subsystem is knadgered which is quite serious :-)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2799 ***