Message all local hosts?

[sonny81]

Sorry if this belongs in the feature request section, but I was wondering if there was a way for freenas to send out a message to all LAN hosts at the same time?

For example, whenever the server is going to be down and giving everyone a heads. Granted, I know I can do this with regular email lists, but it would be cool if I could send a pop up message or something.

 

[cyberjock]

It would require a service on your workstations to received and process the message, then display it appropriately. There may be tools on the FreeNAS installation that may be able to send such a message, but without some software on the workstation it won't matter.

 

[ProtoSD]

There's the Unix command "wall" (write all) that can send broadcast messages, but not to other OS's, unless it's been ported to them. It's installed by default on FreeNAS.

 

[sonny81]

Understood. Thanks so much for the info guys!! I'll double check to see if Windows has any compatible software of the sorts but I'm not feeling too confident about it :)

Maybe I'll get proven wrong. Thanks again for the input!!

 

[jgreco]

You're probably looking for "smbclient -M" or some variation thereof, at least for Windows.