Zephyr - the Fastest Way to Talk on Campus
Zephyr lets you send someone a message without requiring you to locate them on a particular machine. You can also send messages to instances (similar to bboards), in which case it will be read by everyone currently logged in who has subscribed to that instance. The only problem with it is that you and the recipient(s) must both be authenticated to AFS (using kinit) and subscribed to Zephyr at the same time the message is sent. This can be troublesome because AFS authentication expires after a day and the Zephyr daemon sometimes dies on its own, so you will almost certainly miss some messages. Zephyr is only available on CS machines, it's not supported on the IUS Suns yet.
Why use Zephyr? It has become the first choice of many folks in the CS department; lots of discussion and problem solving that used to happen on bboards now happens on Zephyr. Very often posting a question yields an answer in seconds, rather than the minutes or hours typically required by bboards.
/usr/misc/bin/kinit userid /usr/misc/.zephyr/etc/zwgc & /usr/misc/.zephyr/etc/zwgc -ttymode &
Kinit will authenticate you to AFS, zwgc will fire up the zephyr daemon. Messages sent to you will appear in individual X windows if you run zwgc without any parameters, -ttymode will cause all messages to appear in the current window (very much like tell(1) or write(1)).
zwrite user [user ...] Are you ready to go to lunch? .
End your message with "." or control-D. You can list one or more users as recipients: if a recipient is not logged in, you will be told the message could not be delivered.
zctl add message www '*' zctl add message unix-forum '*' zctl del message zippy '*' zctl list
Use zctl to add, delete, or list your current subscriptions. You can also use it interactively (no command line arguments). Any changes you make will be reflected immediately in your ~/.zephyr.subs file. Be aware that people can create instances on the go; it's common to find people posting to unix-forum (dash), unix.forum (dot), even unix_forum (underscore), so if you want to catch it all you'll have to subscribe to all the possibilities.
zwrite -i vasc Pit and brn are losing it in Wean; how's it look in Smith? . zwrite -i help Does anybody really know what time it is? .
Don't forget to add the "-i" when sending to an instance; and especially don't forget to leave it out when writing to a person!! Unless you want those folks who read every instance to read your personal messages also...
Although Zephyr messsages have an ephemeral quality to them (you miss a lot if you're not logged in), folks have started logging all the instance messages. So now you can go away for days or weeks, come back and read all the zephyrs you missed! The Zephyr Archive Service has a simple WWW interface.
Or if you just want to know what's happened in the past 24 hours, send a message to the Zephyr History daemon. The body of your message should be a regular expression that will be matched against instance names, e.g.:
zwrite dkindred -i zephyr-history www . zwrite dkindred -i zephyr-history unix.forum .
In response you'll get a single message that contains the full day's message log.
Those of you who live in Emacs will be happy to know a zephyr emacs interface is available.
Sometimes people post "unusual" messages; more than 60 lines long, more than 150 characters per line. People running the default zwgc will find the resulting X windows to be so big that you can't see all of the message (zephyr windows don't scroll). The best solution is to fire up an xterm window and run zwgc with the -ttymode option there.
Zephyr has some audio message support, but I've never gotten it to work. Something like:
zctl add audio '*' '*'
is supposed to enable audio, but since I can't run zwgc on my console machine I've never gotten this to work. Send mail to help@cs. :-) If you're on a VASC sun that has a microphone you might want to check out the ivs program.
Most (if not all) of these programs are only available on CS machines, IUS suns don't support them yet. Look in /usr/misc/bin/ if they're not already on your path.
~/.zephyr.subs (your current subscriptions) zephyr(1), zctl(1), zwrite(1), zwgc(1), zlocate(1), kinit(1) List of Common Local Zephyr Instances CS Facilities documentation MIT Athena Zephyr Documentation
tell(1), write(1), talk(1), trn(1), ivs(1), kauthd(1bsy)
mwm@cmu.edu
8 October 94 Links added by mwm