[PLUG] remote user notifications

[Chris Jantzen]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 02:19:53PM -0800, Felix Lee wrote:
> Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com>:
> > Today's 'stump the gurus' question: what can you do for remote users who
> > are running X, like Gnome or KDE or some such, and who won't see console 
> > messages? Especially shutdown or reboot messages?
> 
> a. notify people at least a day in advance.  a week in advance is
>    better.  regular weekly maintenance time is good.
> 
> b. ask everyone to run a message program like zephyr or AIM or
>    whatever, send alerts that way.  or set up a 'system alert'
>    mailing list, which allows people to subscribe their
>    email->pager gateway, etc.
> 
> c. the hard part is emergencies that involve failure in the
>    messaging mechanism.  writing a message to a person's tty is a
>    very simple and robust mechanism.  if that doesn't work then
>    the whole system is likely to be unusable, and it won't be a
>    big deal to reboot without advance notice.  offhand, I can't
>    think of any other message mechanism with that characteristic.
> 
>    if it's important, set up a list of phone numbers to call for
>    alerts.

I second Mr Lee's suggestions. The other suggestions thusfar involve
either revealing too much information or depending on the system
having tty's available (such as xterm), which can't be depended
upon. If it's a tunnel, even snarfing xauth permissions is dubious,
though that would be second attempt besides the above (using some
GNOME/KDE tool for scripting dialog boxes). Since the user may not
even be present and have work open, there's just no way to guarantee
no data loss in the cases of "emergencies". Patience in rebooting is
more likely effective.

-- 
chris kb7rnl =->
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