corwin@talcott.harvard.edu (-David C. Kovar) (02/22/89)
Our users tend to cover the entire display with one application window, effectively covering up the console. They'll happily ignore the beeps indicating that a console message has arrived and thus will be quite oblivious to the fact that the file server is about to take a two hour nap. I'd like to be able to send a message to all of the active clients that would be displayed in a popup window with a "Done" box on top of all other existing windows. Has anyone done anything like this? Any pointers to easily modified code to do something like this? I started tearing apart someone's SDI game and managed to get a window to pop up once and vanish in an instant. Unfortunately, I lack the time to investigate it's behaviour in depth at the moment. Any leads would be quite appreciated. -David Kovar [[ Something that works along these lines is Chuck Musciano's "contool". This tool requests to receive all the console messages (thus taking the place of the "CONSOLE" cmdtool) and will stay in a iconic state until it receives a console message. Then it opens itself up (on top of all other windows) and beeps. One must use the "Close" menu selection to get it out of the way. It is in the archives under "sun-source" as "contool.shar". It can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host "titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server. For more information about the archive server, send a mail message containing the word "help" to the address "archive-server@rice.edu". I use it all the time in place of the standard console cmdtool. It's great! --wnl ]]
montnaro@uunet.uu.net (Skip Montanaro) (03/21/89)
Wnl wondered what Sun escape sequences inside rwall messages would do to non-Sun devices. I suspect the problems will be minimal. Instead of the rwall user having to stick that stuff in though, I think rwalld should be modified to realize what type of environment is being run on each login session to which it will write messages. (I don't presume to know how it would find this information out. I suspect someone with the appropriate Sun system expertise could solve the problem.) The four (Sun) environments I see as important to support are Suntools, X, NeWS, and teletypes or CRTs. In the first three cases, rwalld should fork appropriate client applications to create a pop-up window containing the message. In the fourth case it could perform the write itself. Is this bizarre, or what? Skip Montanaro (montanaro@sprite.steinmetz.ge.com, montanaro@ge-crd.arpa)