Don Russell wrote:
Don Russell wrote:
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.
You can use winpopup, where it's available, or "net send" to send
messages to some Windows hosts. However, the Messenger service that
receives the popups will be disabled on newer Windows installations, and
you'll need to turn it on.
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?
You could write a script to use "smbclient -N -L <browser>" and parse
the output for a list of Windows hosts, and then use "smbclient -M" to
send messages to each one individually. I've never used LinPopup or
LinPopup-2, but you could see if either of those would work.
Bear in mind, any solution that you pick is going to depend on proper
firewall configuration on your Windows machines, proper configuration of
the Windows Messenger service, and will not apply to your Mac OS or
Linux hosts.
Of course, the pop-up should not take the focus away from the current
application running.... I hate that...
You won't get any control over that. It's a function of the window
manager (or the Windows shell application).
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"... :-)
Don't do that... You'll save yourself a tremendous amount of time if you
just use Jabber instead. Openfire is a great Free Software Jabber server:
http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp
Between Jabber and Windows Messenger, it seems like one or the other
would fit your needs. Writing your own would be a huge waste of effort.
