[Techtalk] remote user notifications

[Carla Schroder]

On Thursday 01 January 2004 3:31 pm, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Telsa. I have some users that I need to have this functionality for, so 
all I need to do is train them to keep an xterm running somewhere. It's not 
that big a deal, I can even set it up to run automatically. mwah haa haa, I 
have the power.

-- 
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Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
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