Karl Larsen wrote:
Don Russell wrote:I assume your planning a LAN which ties all the computers together. Do this right and you will be able to send all computers mail saying Please stop ect.I have an FC7 box running some basic things like e-mail etc.The LAN is basicaly made up of that machine and a handful of Windows (2000 and XP) machines. I am also anticipating adding an Apple Mac machine to the mix, as well as a Linux laptop.I want an application on the FC7 box to send a "pop up" message to all the other machines on the network.In researching "net send <bios-name> <text>" I discovered a program like WinPopup is needed on the windows machines... further investigation into that looks like it's old information, pertaining to Windows 3.1, 95 and 98, explicitly NOT supported in Windows NT... and I'm assuming Windows 2000/XP.The question is... how do I make my FC7 box "aware" of all the other machines on the peer network so it knows who to send messages to?Is there some sort of broadcast I can send out like a "OK, sound off...." and all recipients of that broadcast respond with a "OK, my name is ..." (or just having the IP address would probably suffice)Then I can send the message to each device that replied... Anybody have any pointers/suggestions? Thank you
Yes, the computers are all connected via the LAN, though they do not share any disk space etc. Each of the Windows machines use an IMAP e-mail client to talk to the FC7 box. Each machine can FTP to the FC7 box, and ssh....
In this case, I don't want to send mail because it may not be seen in a timely fashion. (i.e. it may be DELIVERED quickly, but not seen for several minutes etc, depending on how often the e-mail client checks... and then how often the human checks. :-)
The other reason for not using e-mail, is the message content is useful for only a short period of time. I'd really like a window to pop up and the user has to click something to dismiss it... or it could time out after n seconds....
Of course, the pop-up should not take the focus away from the current application running.... I hate that... I'm typing along in something, and all of a sudden some other app decides to popup a window and set focus there so my typing continues in the wrong window.... :-(
I'm thinking I may have to write my own little specialized client/server thingy for this.... not the end of the world, but it seems so basic I thought I'd check "what's out there"... :-)
