Unfortunately, winPopup is a DOS magnet. I don't think that a firewall can help because winPopup uses the same protocol as file and print sharing so you would be blocking other functions too. But perhaps I'm wrong about this.
There are other messaging services (eg. Jabber). Has anyone used one of them?
I wrote up a couple of perl scripts (a client and a server) to deal with sending printing error dialogs to users. Please email me directly if you're interested; I'd be happy to share.
Features:
- Daemon can run (and therefore display messages on) Windows and Mac OS X. Support for Solaris (and probably any Unix with GTK libraries installed) is planned real soon now, when I get some time.
- You can specify a number of params for the message, including the dialog title, # of times to beep, icon for the dialog.
- You can specify a timeout for sending messages (very useful when you are calling this from an lprng filter script and don't want network oddities to delay the print queue).
- The daemon will only accept messages from machines on an allowed hosts list.
Limitations:
- You can only send messages from a Unix machine.
- You need to have perl and the daemon installed on all workstations you want to message.
Basic Installation
- Populate the allowed host list in the daemon code.
- On each workstation, install the Win32::OLE perl module (Windows only)
- On each workstation, install and configure the daemon to run when a user logs in.
- Send messages.
Phillip --
***************************************************************** Phillip Stark Instructional Computing Lab Operations Manager University of California, Santa Cruz
Got a question? Get an answer: http://ic.ucsc.edu/help *****************************************************************
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address
If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient, to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with: | example: subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
