Talk and "protocol not supported"

[Chris Torek]

In article <6312 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
>Barry's right, [talk] is a crock.

I hate to insult programs---it feels as though I am insulting the
programmer, by impliciation---but Barry and Guy are right.

>The only place in a standard 4.2BSD kernel (I presume yours is standard,
>right?) that gives that error is the "socket" call, and it only gives that
>error if no protocol of the type asked for exists.  "talk" asks for a socket
>of type SOCK_STREAM in address family AF_INET, and then for a socket of type
>SOCK_DGRAM in the same address family.  The only way that can fail is if you
>haven't configured in Internet protocol support, ...

This should indeed be the case, yet I have seen the very same error.
There was no code path in the kernel that would have returned that
error for any reasonable operation; and I could only conclude that
talk (or talkd) was at fault yet again.  After one look inside
talk, I never pursued it further.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 1516)
UUCP:	seismo!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris at umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu