smbwall

[David Lee]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Garry J. Garrett wrote:

> Attached is a shell script, "smbwall". It basically sends a
> "wall" (or really more akin to "rwall") message to anyone
> who has a drive mapped via samba.
> 
> The shell script uses "smbstatus" to get a list of people
> who have drives mapped, then it loops through that list,
> using "smbclient" to send a windows pop-up message to the
> users.
> 
> Of course, perhaps it would be cleaner to graft together
> source code from "smbstatus" and "smbclient" into a binary
> called "smbwall", but the shell script is functional as
> it is.  I run the shell script on Sun Solaris, but I so
> nothing about that is Solaris specific.

It is good to see that there is someone else who wishes to have this sort
of functionality associated with Samba.

A couple of months ago, I implemented and tested something similar, but
coded into Samba itself.  My "philosophical" starting point was similar,
though not identical, to yours.  I identified three things (there may well
be more) where the _easy_ ability to issue such popup message might be
useful:

1. the real "wall" command:  e.g. when system "shutdown" alerts
   terminal users it also automatically alerts samba users;

2. the ability simply to "write" to a Samba user as one would write to
   a terminal user;

3. for future internal use by other parts of "smbd" (e.g. "vfs" routines,
   quota warnings, ...).

This would assist Garry's "smbwall" command.  Instead of doing "smbstatus"
and having to post-process its output, then individually calling
"smbclient" for each process (we routinely have over 800), it would simply
"write" to all the named pipes (or equivalent) maintained by the smbds
themselves.

(Note that running an 800+ simultaneous (nearly 20,000 registered) user
environment gives different service-support perspectives from that of a
small lab.) 


To the Samba Team:  There are at least two of us who have spotted the
usefulness of such functionality, to the extent of actually trying to
implement it.  Would it be possible, please, for us to discuss with one of
you this idea some more, to obtain a clean, flexible enhancement to Samba
for such activity?  (This need not necessarily be on the list, simply to
reduce list-noise for others.) 

Thanks.

-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
:                                           University of Durham  :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham                :
:  Phone: +44 191 374 2882                  U.K.                  :