[Ilugc] Re: One Day One GNU/Linux Command (WALL)
- From: kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx (Kapil Hari Paranjape)
- Date: Thu Jul 3 12:00:51 2008
Hello,
On Wed, 02 Jul 2008, msverman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
<sarasm ignored>
In windows, there is a console utility called NET SEND, by which we can
send messages to other users, computers, or messaging names on the local
area network.
This is a much better explanation. It could have been written as
follows.
Lan Messenger::
In the Windows context the LAN consists of a number of
*single-user* desktop machines connected to each other
and possibly to some server machines and sharing resources in
various ways over the network.
In a Windows LAN one service available on the LAN is to send a
message to a specific collection of desktops. This is called
"Lan Messenger".
Since a typical Unix LAN is *not* structured as a collection of
single-user machines, such a service is typically not available in a
Unix LAN.
If you really need such a service it is not difficult to create it in
a Unix environment. For example, a shell script like
for host in $(ypcat hosts)
do
rexec $host wall < /tmp/msg &
done
This would require each user to have login access on every machine on
the network. This has associated security issues which can be solved
using ssh or Kerberos.
With multicast and broadcast networking one can think of a lot of more
interesting things. For example, see "whiteboard".
Services that are more "unixy" and already exist to provide similar
features are "IRC" and "talk".
Kapil.
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