That jpeg image viewing with fP...

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was Brian K. White--said:
> It sounds potentially really useful, but, All of our sites have had
> FacetWin for years, and FacetWin has that* and we've never actually used
> it once.

What do you do, just surprise your users with downtime?  Or only do
scheduled downtimes, emergencies be damned?

> * including a win based gui sender as well as a unix command line sender,

Trivial to do the win-based one.  I already have a subroutine that I used
for "Give Feedback" for a program I did for my wife's company.  That one
submits to a CGI.  This would simply do a UDP broadcast (or series of them)
as necessary.  Not much difference.  And it's just as each to get the input
from a file as from the GUI widget.  

> and a systray client on every pc that even reenables itself any time
> you use the terminal emulator even if a user deliberately disabled the
> systray client in msconfig startup, and a sending option that sends to
> all.

THAT could be annoying--the re-enabling part.  If I disable something, I
-want- it disabled, period.  

And you don't want (from an admin standpoint) everyone to be able to send
to all.  Only people that have the admin client.

> In samba-land, there is also winpopup which has been a built-in part of
> windows forever, that is usually disabled these days because spammers
> figured out how to send ads to it.  You can enable that on the pc's
> and there is a command for sending messages to that in both samba and
> visionfs (the only other smb server available on sco) I don't know if
> there is a "send to all" option offhand, but even if there wasn't, it
> wouldn't be hard to get a list of workgroups & pc's from smbclient, or
> get a list of IP's from arp -a, and then send to each one.

The advantage of what I'm considering being that you wouldn't have to
be using SMB or have an SMB/CIFS suite installed.  And it would only
send to machines currently in the "I'm listening to you" hash--which
would get updated when machines started the client, ended the client, or
timed out (I'm thinking a configurable 30min timeout for any given host,
combined with an "I'm alive" from the client every 10 minutes should do the
trick--three times to possibly fail a UDP keepalive).  So you're only
sending to computers that want to be listening.

Interesting to see it's been done before.  I hadn't seen any
freeware/shareware type things like that when I looked.  The one from Facet
sounds okay, but if you don't need Facet, it's mighty expensive just to get
that one bit of functionality.

Like I said, I'm thinking companies (or organisations) where you might want
it in place and you have nothing else going.  Could be cool for university
lab clusters, actually.  Say, $150 site licenses with each machine above
the 150th being $1 per machine in blocks of 10.  

mark->
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