I'm running Linux as a server and I wish to announce when the system will be rebooting to the network. I have Windows users connecting via SMB and I wish to broadcast a message stating that the server will be rebooting in two minutes, please save all of your work now!

How could I do this? thank you.

Hi Darth,

Thank you. However, is that for a broadcast over a network?? I don't have the time right now to look at in close detail, but from the little I saw, it would appear that is for a user sitting at the Linux box. The message needs to be broadcast accross the network to my Windows clients. I'll take a closer look at it later, but are you sure that's what this is for?

You can send popups with smbclient. I don't know the syntax but I worked in an environment where that was done. I think it was:

smbclient -M or something like that.

The command is:

smbclient -M <name of computer you want to message>

You then get a prompt where you can enter your message

I only have one other computer on my network, so I am not sure whether you can enter multiple names at the command line or not.

Very good. That worked. However, to run an automated message at a particular time??? Say, for example, the server will be rebooting in 5 minutes, save your work now!!

I want to shove that into cron 5 minutes before the server will restart. I started a script to do it. It's not working though. How would I automate this?? What has happened when I ran it is it runs the smbclient -M but does not send the message in the script. Perhaps I'll ask a friend of mine.

This is what I have so far. . . To force the system to do ctrl-d and send that message I'm not sure about. Any ideas?

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# This script will send a winpopup message to the smbclients in your workgroup

smbclient -M hp-pavilion-pi

The Linux Server will be rebooting in 5 minutes. . . Please save all of your work now!!

Hi Everyone,

Well, I thought I would share with you my solution. If anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears. This is what I did:

I made three separate text files (for 5 min, 3 min, and 1 min) for the different warnings. They are named:

restart5.txt
restart3.txt
restart1.txt

Then, I made 3 short shell scripts to execute them:

restart5.sh

# This script will send a WinPop message to the Windows Clients 5 minutes
# prior to restart.

cat restart5.txt | smbclient -M hp-pavilion-pi

restart3.sh

# This script will send a winpop to the Windows machines 3 min before restart

cat restart3.txt | smbclient -M hp-pavilion-pi

And so on. . .

Next I plugged the scripts into CRON to run at the appropriate times. Maybe that's a backwards way of doing it, but again, if someone else has any better ideas, I'm totally all ears!!

You could wrap it into one script and use the at command and take it out of CRON.

Umm, how would I do that???