I have a slack server running on my network...it has no display or input devices, only cables are power and ethernet. I have it set up with ssh for remote admin, and vnc for remote x-windows access. It is sitting behind my wireless router with port forwarding set up for remote ftp and ssh access.

1st question: can someone suggest a way for my server to send some type of popup window to my windows machine after it boots, so that I know when it becomes available on the network? Just a simple text message would work.

2nd question: since I have dhcp supplying an IP to my router which changes every now and then, is there a way to check the IP every so often, and email myself the new IP whenever it renews?

Thanks in advance

1 - The offical way would be to use samba's smbclient command with the -M option, check the manpage for details.

2 - Yeah there are plenty of simple scripts you can run to inspect the output of ifconfig etc... search the forum and i'm sure you'll get plenty of examples.

Thanks for the reply Chris. Regarding the smbclient -M command, it seems that this would use the windows "messenger" service if sent to a machine running XP...is this true? I remember turning this off a while back when spammers found that they could use it for exploiting windows users, now that I'm behind a firewall though it seems like a nice way to accomplish my goal.

Yeah, I would also suggest "smbclient -M" in rc.local.

You are correct that this would need the Windows Messenger service running on your Windows computer. You are also correct that since you now have an incoming packet firewall, there is no problem with running the Messenger service on the machine (beyond the system resource use, anyway).

For the second question, arpwatch should do what you want, email you when MAC->IP binding changes. That will email you when any IP changes though, so that might be more information then you want to deal with.