December 12, 2011
How to Send a Real-Time Message to Your Dedicated Server Users
For the most part, you will likely be able to leave your various server tenants alone. They’ll do as they do with the space you lease them while you continue to perform all of the maintenance and dirty work behind the scene. However, how can you inform them of some drastic change without resorting to exterior tools like eMail, Twitter, or—God forbid—Facebook? Surprisingly, it isn’t quite as hard as you might think! With a Linux base, sending an all channel hail to your server users is actually quite easy. There are a few steps involved, though, which we’ll detail below.
To begin with, you’re going to need a utility called wall. Wall is a small, UNIX-based tool designed to enable you to send messages directly to your users via the server shell. It’s hardly invasive, and you won’t have to worry about security issues, as the utility works entirely within the existing framework of your server. However, we should probably mention that you’ll only want to send these sorts of messages when you have to. Save Wall use for important alerts, software update notices, etc, or your clients may begin to feel a bit harangued. Once you’ve acquired the software piece, move on to the first steps below!
1. Make the Message: Firstly, you’ll want to create the actual message you intend to send to your users. You can do this using whatever text editor you prefer, but if you’re looking for suggestions, we might recommend using vi or Nano. If the latter, simply make a new text document as so:
nano newmessage.txt
You will then want to enter whatever message you’d like your users to see. For example, if you’d like to have them see “Hello, world! We, the robots of the server, have stolen your things!” enter it, and then save it to the text document. Then:
2. Ship It, Danno: From here, you’ll simply want to execute the appropriate Wall command to send the text file to your users. It’s a short string that looks like this:
wall newmessage.txt
Once completed, your users should see something like this on their screens, posted in real-time:
Broadcast Message from root@serverschool
(/dev/pts/1) at 18:15 …
This is a warning to all users. It’s my birthday!
And that’s it! Just be sure to limit your message to twenty lines or less, and you’ll do fine!
Categories: Dedicated Servers |
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