From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 21 13:36:17 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from navy.csi.cam.ac.uk (navy.csi.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C83D915930 for ; Wed, 21 Apr 1999 13:34:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bjc23@cam.ac.uk) Received: from bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.193.197]) by navy.csi.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.05 #3) id 10a3eg-0003hg-00; Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:31:34 +0100 Received: from bjc23 by bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Postman Pat (and his black and white cat)) id 10a3ef-0000Lp-00; Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:31:33 +0100 Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:31:33 +0100 (BST) From: "Ben J. Cohen" X-Sender: bjc23@bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk Reply-To: bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Usernames and TalkD Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi! I would like to alter talkd so that there is a default user corresponding to any username which doesn't exist on my machine. Thus talk root talk bjc23 will work as before, but if ben isn't an entry in /etc/passwd then talk ben will automatically be referred to bjc23 (or root if preferred). Can this be done? Would it be easy to do? ------------- More generally, is it possible to have user ``aliases'' for talkd as well? e.g. talk ben would always go to bjc23; talk al would always go to ano01, etc. This could be done by a /etc/talkd.rc file, or a /etc/passwd.aliases file, or another field in /etc/passwd... I don't know how much this would involve changing user programs, but then the alias feature could be added to other things like login as desired. This would be useful for shortcuts (ben is easier to remember than bjc23) and if you have different usernames on different machines. Would this be a useful feature, and how hard would it be to implement? (Note that having users with different usernames but the same UID in /etc/passwd doesn't solve the talk problem and can cause other problems, and isn't recommended in the man page;) Thanks, Ben. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message