pop up message to users

[tjv]

I have a site with 200 thin terminals and I want to beable to send a popup message to users to tell them to logoff the system and what not. does anyone know of a program that will work?

 

[Morsing]

wall?

Cheers

Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[lullysing]

And Dave, looking upon this, saw that the answer was in the command called ....

-----(snipped from man file)------

shutdown - close down the system at a given time
SYNOPSIS
shutdown [-Ddfhknpr] time [message ... | -]
DESCRIPTION
shutdown provides an automated shutdown procedure for super-users to nicely notify users when the system is shutting down, saving them from system administrators, hackers, and gurus, who would otherwise not bother with such niceties.

Available friendlinesses:
(+ a whole bunch of options , including one which boots every (non-root) users instead of halting the system )
-------(end snip)-------

Wall also would work, but you get the added benefit or an automated warning system with shutdown.

 

[tjv]

problem is is that users dont have a terminal screen open at all times. Wall only displays in a terminal session. I need a popup like xmessage to show up in all X11 sessions and not just my own.

We are running LTSP and the users all use apps like mozilla, openoffice and email.

thanks

 

[lullysing]

I'm not sure ( i'll have to test tonight on my home box ) but i think wall does a popup on xwindows. Not sure about shutdown.

I'll test both and tell you resuslts, deal?

 

[lullysing]

Apparently, something called " kwrited " does popups with system messages ( both wall and shutdown ) under KDE3. You might want to look into a solution like this one for your users.