[Techtalk] remote user notifications

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 02:58:45PM -0800 or thereabouts, Carla Schroder wrote:
> Today's 'stump the gurus' question: what can you do for remote users who are 
> running X, like Gnome or KDE or some such, and who won't see console 
> messages? Especially shutdown or reboot messages? Or other vitally important 
> broadcasts from the local friendly BOFH? 

As we discovered on IRC, if they are running a terminal (xterm,
gnome-terminal, presumably konsole, rxvt), they will see wall
(wall: write to all) and reboot messages.

It has never occurred to me to wonder about this before. I
don't know what happens if they are not running a terminal.
If you are a university sysadmin wanting to tell a classful
of people working on spreadsheets or word processors to save
their work because you're rebooting in ten minutes, I don't
know what you do if they are only running those apps and do
not have a terminal.

Telsa