That jpeg image viewing with fP...

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: "filePro Mailing List" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: That jpeg image viewing with fP...


> 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?

What a stupid unecessarily antagonistic and unproductive response.

Maybe it's your Linux mentality that even accepts the notion of downtime.

We don't HAVE downtime that could be warned against. Hardware might die 
unexpectedly, power might go out and outlast the battery, some unwise person 
might unplug something, none of those can be warned anyways with the 
possible exception of the battery, which the ups software walls everyone 
that matters, which is everyone who's logged in.

Server maintenance and replacement is so rare that it warrants a special 
midnight/weekend/holiday operation by me, and usually I manage to have 
things pre-prepared (is that redundant?) such that even for a switch to a 
whole new server the downtime is approximately 3 minutes and no changes 
necessary on any pc's or anythung else on the rest of the network. Because I 
do not find even fully warned downtime during working hours to be an 
acceptable level of service. It's surprizing that you apparently do, given 
your willingness to criticize others about sysadmin practices.

On those exceptionally rare cases where some downtime is anavoidable, 
generally at 24/7 sites where there is no natural downtime, we feel bad 
enough about it that we call people on the phone and apologetically tell 
them we will need to do X and even then we let them finish up anything they 
want and call us back at THEIR leisure to let us proceed.


>> * 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.

That's interesting.

>
> 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.

Oh of course.
My point was not that FacetWin has it.
My point was that all of our sites have had it for several years and we've 
never had occasion to use it.
We have had occasion to wall people now and then, but by only going to the 
logged-in terminals, it actually went to exactly the people that needed to 
know.
Yes there are services that would be disrupted that don't involve a login 
session. If you have a site that uses those services heavily enough that 
people would need to be warned before they go down than that would be an 
example of a need for a utility like that. It happens that none of our sites 
use the various non-login services very much except in direct concert with a 
login session.
I'm not disparaging the product idea, I'm offering my observed experience as 
a warning that it might not be in very high demand because it's been 
available for a long time already in a few different forms, some free, some 
even already built in to windows, (see below for yet more) and even so I 
don't see people using it. Maybe your refinement of the idea would make the 
difference and make it into something useful.

> 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.

I think most sites that need this, have a policy that involves everyone 
using some IM client.

Then back on the winpopup track, there is also "net send * this is a test" 
for a wall sender that is also built in since forever.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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