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From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Subject: a talkd/write improvement I made
Date: 27 Jun 1996 03:34:32 -0400
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One of the annoyances of talk is that it's all or nothing. If one
has mesg y, anyone can talk to you; otherwise, no one can. So I
modified talkd so that it checks a .talkrc file in one's home
directory. A .talkrc might contain something like this:

steph@cyberenet.net
!*@cyberenet.net
*@admin.cyberenet.net

This means: allow steph@cyberenet.net to "talk"; forbid everyone
else on that machine. Allow anyone at admin.cyberenet.net to talk;
forbid everyone else. (It's using fnmatch(3).)

This is all well and good, except that the write program can also
be an annoyance. So I modified it, too. But there's a problem.
While talkd runs as root and so can see anyone's .talkrc, write
runs as the invoking user and if that user can't see the callee's
.talkrc, write reverts to the default behavior, which is to allow
the write.

Anyway, if the FreeBSD people want the patches, I'll send them
along. But if they want them, they probably should let me know
how they want the above irregularity resolved....