Having difficulty with UNIX concept. Please help! Post: 302102468

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Having difficulty with UNIX concept. Please help! Post 302102468 by ALon on Wednesday 10th of January 2007 04:02:17 PM

01-10-2007

Registered User

Having difficulty with UNIX concept. Please help!

Hi,

I would be very happy if someone could help me please. I am relatively new to UNIX, and still learning.

My understanding of things are:
Say I have a PC running Windows. This machine has a name. If I have 10 PC's, then I have 10 names, one for each PC. Each PC is independent of the other. It is a separate entity. Each has it's own file system, CPU, RAM, harddrive etc...

Now, considering UNIX...
At university there are about 50 machines in the lab. Each is a box, with a label on it stating its hostname e.g abc.def.ac.uk.
So I am assuming that each is a machine in its own right, yes? i.e. if we were to open the box, inside each machine will have its own CPU, own RAM, own motherboard etc. Is this correct?
Now how does the UNIX bit come in? It says that UNIX is supposed to be "multi user, multi tasking, time sharing". Does this simply mean that some other user too can remotely log into that box and use it to do their work?

Now for the other question. If I sit at machine 1, and create a file, and then I log out, and log in on machine 5, then that file is visible. Does this mean that when I created that file, it was not created on the harddrive of machine 1, but rather on a big hard drive inside the server room?

So, I am very confused here. There seem to be many directory structures, one somewhere in a server room which stores everything, and one on each box where the UNIX O/S is stored.

Someone please address what I am asking using simple, laymen terms.

Thanks a lot.

A

Last edited by ALon; 01-10-2007 at 05:08 PM..

ALon

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LEARN ABOUT ULTRIX

talkd

talkd(8c)																 talkd(8c)

Name
       talkd - inter-terminal communications server

Syntax
       /etc/talkd

Description
       The  program  is  the  server  for the program.	The server provides a rendezvous method for the requesting (possibly remote) and the local
       responding

       The server is invoked by when it receives a packet on the port indicated in the talk service specification.

Restrictions
       The server does not strictly follow network byte order in its packet format and may have difficulty in talking with implementations  of	on
       other architectures that do not take this into account.

       The  version  of  released  with ULTRIX V3.0 uses a protocol that is incompatible with the protocol used in earlier versions. Starting with
       ULTRIX V3.0, the program communicates with other machines running ULTRIX, V3.0 (and later), and machines running 4.3  BSD  or  versions	of
       UNIX based on 4.3 BSD.

       The command is not 8-bit clean. Typing in DEC Multinational Characters (DECMCS) causes the characters to echo as a sequence of a carets (^)
       followed by the character represented with its high bit cleared. This limitation makes unusable if you want to communicate using a language
       which has DECMCS characters in its alphabet.

See Also
       talk(1), services(5), inetd(8c), ntalkd(8c)

																	 talkd(8c)