Informing other users

[Dieter Schicker]

Ewan Mac Mahon wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 03:57:28PM +0200, Dieter Schicker wrote:
>> Peter Garrett wrote:
>>> On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:54:04 +0200
>>> Dieter Schicker <dieter.schicker at uni-graz.at> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In my network I want to be able to send small informative messages to
>>>> the users that are currently logged in. I want it that way that a popup
>>>> window appears on the users screen which shows the message. I heard
>>>> about linpopup, but it requires samba and I'm not willing to install
>>>> samba on each workstation.
>>>>
>>>> Any ideas?
>>> Well, this works with ssh:
>>>
>>> ssh user at host xmessage -display :0 "Free Pizza upstairs in 5 minutes"
>> Thanks, works great!
>>
> Really? It shouldn't work if the user you're logging in as (yourself,
> presumably) is not the user that's logged in to the X server. Unless
> you're doing cunning things as root, of course.

No, I don't use ssh directly for that. I have a small secure SOAP Server
running on each client I communicate with. This daemon pops up the
information window on the desktop of the user. It's simple and it works. ;-)

What I'm still searching for is the ability to "freeze" the screen
behind the popup window (as it is done when a user wants to do
administrative tasks). I would not mind writing a small gtk-perl script
for that but I don't know how to do it. Any ideas?

Many thanks and cheers

Dieter