Lasker 2.2.3 ICS and WinBoard

[hgm]

I have installed the Lasker version of the chessd ICS software on one of my PCs (running under Ubuntu). This is the server that is supposed to use the same protocol as FICS.

If I use telnet to login to it, either from the same PC, or from another one on my internal network, everything works fine: I can match myself on the other machine, and play a game with one of the ASCII board formats.

However, when I try to use WinBoard to connect to it, with 'timeseal' as icsHelper, I cannot login, because whatever I type, the ICS complains that the login name was non-alphabetic. I altered the ICS code to echo what exactly it received as username, and it turns out it gets a long string of garbage characters (displayed as characters with diacrititical marks in the WinBoard ICS communication window). So no wonder the ICS complains.

I am not sure what exactly goes wrong here. This WinBoard (4.2.7b, which I freshly downloaded from Tim Mann's page) works fine when I connect with FICS or ICC. My conclusion is that it must be due to timeseal, as everything works fine when I connect through telnet. I tried using timestamp as -icsHelper in stead, but that did not work either. Do I need a special icsHelper program for the Lasker server?

Who can help me here?

[hgm]

OK, I figured it out. Seems you have to start up the server with a separate timeseal decoder process, through the -T option, and that this is not automatically installed.