As a business continuity communications measure, we've been asked to look into 
the possibility of raising an emergency message on a user's session in *nix. 
For example,

"Wildfire is approaching the local campus. Employees are asked to evacuate in 
an orderly manner"

I know that some distros have mechanisms that can be exploited positively for 
this purpose (e.g., puplet) and I vaguely remember a program called xdialog 
from many years ago. Basicaly, I'd like to be on an administrative machine and 
issue the request for a pop up to be launched on the user's console. I don't 
want to issue xhost commands and prefer to avoid new daemons. The primary 
targets are Solaris and Linux workstations.

This doesn't have to be a 100% solution but I would like to cover the majority 
cases on Solaris and Linux.

I've looked into it and have crafted a proof of concept on Linux using 
xmessage. I launch a script that looks to see who owns the console and issue 
xmessage as that user. This works well for the primary case of a plain vanilla 
user logged in at the console. I haven't begun to address more exotic consoles 
(e.g., via XDMCP or Graphon's GoGlobal). 

Before I continue further, does anyone believe there is a simpler solution? If 
not, should I compile xmessage for Solaris or is there a prebuilt equivalent 
program for Solaris that is already part of the Solaris distribution. Our 
Solaris boxen are primarily 9 and 10, and at least the 9 boxen do not have 
xmessage, zenity, kdialog, or gdialog on them.


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