[Wolves] LAN instant messaging

[Alex Willmer]

On Tue, September 5, 2006 11:56 am, daveh wrote:
> I'm putting together the IT system for a community radio station in Brum
> (a completely Linux based setup) and they have a pc in the broadcast
> studio and three pc's in the telephone room. The idea is that when they
> are doing phone-in programs the people answering the phones can send
> messages to the studio pc saying who's on which line and what they want
> to talk about. I've sort of gone in circles with jabberd, hybrid-ircd
> and unreal-irc, my knowledge of servers being very limited - I get
> overwhelmed by the .conf files and end up not knowing why it's not
> working.

Some half baked ideas:

For unix -> unix there was the talk command, it would require shell logins
between the machines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(Unix)

There are apparently successors such as ytalk, which allow more than 2 to
chat simultaneously. I've only used talk (whatever was installed by
Mandrake before it was Mandriva).

For Windows, there was a simple MS chat program I remember using at
school. It was on NT 4.0, and must have used some sort of local network
broadcast, but in recent years I was unable to find a reference to it.

If the message was entirely one way (tel -> studio), you could even fake
it with 'echo Line 7 is waiting >> somefile' and 'tail -f somefile'. But
it would be very hackish.

Alex