[K12OSN] Broadcast message

Jim Hays haysja at sages.us
Fri Oct 29 15:55:39 UTC 2004


This is a good start. 

Could you call this from XDialog? 



Petre Scheie wrote:

> I, too, was playing with xmessage, on Luis's suggestion, and came up 
> with this quick & dirty script (which I'll call brmsg for discussion 
> purposes):
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> # brmsg: Send a broadcast message to all terminal screens
>
>
> for x in `seq 1 30`
> do
> xmessage -center -timeout 10 -display 192.168.0.${x}:0.0 "$@" &
> done
>
>
> One would then call brmsg this way at a command prompt from the server:
>
> brmsg Please logout now or you may be expelled
>
> The message will pop up on the client for 10 seconds and then 
> disappear.  It needs some refinement: For the seq range, it would be 
> better to get a list of clients where someone is actually logged in so 
> it doesn't waste time sending messages to irrelevant workstations; 
> using 'who -T' and piping it to awk would be one way to get such a 
> list.  And, as David suggested, and graphical version of this would be 
> nicer; perhaps I'll try something in perl/tk this weekend (no 
> gaurantees, I've got a ton of leaves to rake).
>
> One requirement is that the client workstation must be configured to 
> accept such messages, which in my server-and-one-client K12LSTP ver 
> 3.0.1 here in my cube, the clients are not.  This can be fixed by adding
>
> xhost +192.168.0.254
>
> to every user's ~/.profile.  This will allow such messages to be sent 
> from the server, but not from other clients which could be a 
> nightmare, e.g. clever students with too much time on their hands.
>
> Hopefully this is a start.
>
> Petre
>
> David Trask wrote:
>
>> Ok...I've never played with xmessage until now....I just tried it, 
>> but  xmessage -Hi There!  only shows up on my onw desktop.....how do I
>> broadcast to all or at least to a chosen user?
>>
>> "Support list for opensource software in schools." 
>> <k12osn at redhat.com> on
>> Friday, October 29, 2004 at 10:32 AM +0000 wrote:
>>
>>> This can be done using xmessage. Since it is part of XFree86, we 
>>> don't have to worry about which window manager is being used.
>>>
>>> One thing I'm not sure about are permission settings with xauth. It 
>>> also need to have the DISPLAY environmental variable temporarily set 
>>> to the display you wish the message to pop up on.
>>>
>>> Luis
>>>
>>>
>>> David Trask wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Ok....I think it's time we find a way to do this and incorporate it 
>>>> as a
>>>> feature in something like TeacherTool.  It has been brought up way too
>>>> many times.  This is a feature in Windows Terminal Server 2003 and 
>>>> should
>>>> be in K12ltsp as well if we can figure it out.  Any ideas?
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> David N. Trask
>> Technology Teacher/Coordinator
>> Vassalboro Community School
>> dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
>> (207)923-3100
>>
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>>
>
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