unix_fan wrote: > 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. > > how about 'shutdown' ? does it have to be gui? you could kill two birds with one stone. It would go into all terminal windows and shutdown the machine at the same time (with a grace period).
Surely if the machine shutdown they'd notice something was wrong too and perhaps give somebody a call? many years and 2 jobs ago I wrote a program that would pop up a non-managed window in front of all other windows and stay there giving the user on the console a message. It would spelunk through the X server, find the cookie, then open up the window with the message. I might be able to find it, though I'm sure it'd need updating and recompiling and may not work at all. It was designed for X11R5 Solaris and assumed some Solaris and Sparc peculiarities of byte ordering and where the location in memory was of the cookie. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
