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Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next.software: 13-Oct-92 How to message
network user.. Aaron D. Herskowitz@reis (704)

>I am looking for a way to send a message to all users logged in to
NeXTs which could  
>notify them of the system being shut-down.  We have thought of a few
ways to do it, but  
>they seem rather usage intensive.  
>
>It is a shame that "wall" doesn't work because of the GUI.  They will
only get the  
>message if they are running terminal or looking at the console file
(which few students  
>do.)  
>
>Is there a way to get terminal to pop-up, etc, or has someone written
an App to do just  
>this? 
>
>Any help/ideas would be very helpful.
>Thanks,
>Aaron 

If you really need this capability, perhaps you should port zephyr to
the NeXT.  It should be fairly trivial to do-- just hack the X Windows
code to bring up a window under the WorkSpace.  This would also give you
communicativity with machines running X11, if such beasts exist at your
site. :-)


Here's part of the man page:


                  Zephyr: A Notification/Communication System

What Zephyr is

    Zephyr is a way to communicate with other users online.  It allows you to
    send messages (Zephyr messages) instantly to another user who is subscribed
    to those categories of Zephyr messages.  The messages will appear in a
    window on the recipient's workstation if the user is running X, or directly
    on their screen if the user is not running X (i.e., on a Unix server).

    Zephyr is also used to make announcements of system-wide importance.
    Because of this, Zephyr is now automatically started when you run X.
 If you
    do not wish to have Zephyr started automatically for you, see the section
    entitled Preventing Zephyr from running.


-Chuck

+---------------------------------------------+ 
|  Charles William Swiger -- CMU sucks rocks  | "The television screen is the
|   AMS & normal mail: cs4w+@andrew.cmu.edu   | retina of the mind's eye."
|    NeXTmail: <temporarily out of order>     |           
+---------------------------------------------+            --Videodrome

   aherskow@reis5.alleg.edu writes:
>>I am looking for a way to send a message to all users logged in to
NeXTs which could  
>>notify them of the system being shut-down.  We have thought of a few
ways to do it, but  
>>they seem rather usage intensive.  
>>
>>It is a shame that "wall" doesn't work because of the GUI.  They will
only get the  
>>message if they are running terminal or looking at the console file
(which few students  
>>do.)  
>>
>>Is there a way to get terminal to pop-up, etc, or has someone written
an App to do just  
>>this? 

   cs4w+@andrew.cmu.edu writes:
>If you really need this capability, perhaps you should port zephyr to
>the NeXT.  It should be fairly trivial to do-- just hack the X Windows
>code to bring up a window under the WorkSpace.  This would also give you
>communicativity with machines running X11, if such beasts exist at your
>site. :-)


For the benefit of you folks that are not on AFS, the X version (Andrew
implementation) of zephyr has  a source tree >8.6 Megabytes.  Conversion
to NeXTStep may be worthwhile, but will most likely be extremely
non-trivial.


Now, why can we simply write a 10 line program that uses NXRunAlertPanel
to run a alert-panel with an OK button, and then arrange to have it run
remotely on whatever machine you wish it run on...  (Net-gurus, is there
any way to have inetd run it on demand?  Or would we need a daemon
process on each machine?)  (For that matter, will it (the daemon or
whatever process) need to be owned by the current user to access the
workspace?)


		-David Apfelbaum
		 da0g+@andrew.cmu.edu