IP Networking

I have talk installed:
yum install talk talk-server

And I have /etc/xinetd.d/talk set to disabled
and /etc/xinetd.d/ntalk set to enabled

I also have opened port 518/udp on server and laptop
and enabled xinetd.service

sudo systemctl enable xinetd.service
sudo systemctl start xinetd.service
sudo systemctl status xinetd.service says that it is running.

AFAIK, the configuration is identical on laptop and server, which both have the same version of everything and both are running Fedora 17.
But if on the server I run talk otheruser, it says [Your party is not logged on] and I KNOW that the party *IS* logged on.
If on server I run:
talk user@laptop;
I get the notification,
and I run talk webmaster@server;
and I get the error Unable to connect with initiator: No route to host. Press any key...
What is going on?

Thanks in advance

PS on laptop doing talk otheruser@laptop works just fine.

talk is a very archaic utility and hasn't been properly maintained in perhaps decades. It may be trying to use protocols older than TCP/IP.

What is the equivalent?

BTW, I was using ntalk.

I don't know of one in this day and age... The ability to just randomly talk to user x in machine y isn't too useful anymore, and the scope of the modern internet means listening to the network at large isn't terribly smart.

It's a really old utility. Many systems no longer have the ability to write to someone else's terminal in that manner. When I traced my version of talk, it wasn't even trying to use TCP, but some weird kind of BSD network socket I'd never heard of, that naturally didn't work.

If you dont know how to fix it, just say so.

By the way, ntalk uses port 518 UDP, which is not some old obsolete protocol. Talk works just fine on my laptop, which is quite a bit newer than the server that talk doesn't work on.