[ale] Cross platform notification

JD jdp at algoloma.com
Fri Jan 10 19:02:20 EST 2014


On 01/10/2014 06:16 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> I was looking into notification methods that I could use for one of my
> projects to send quick messages to multiple machines (pretty much every
> desktop or mobile platform currently in use) on my local network.  I see
> Growl seems to be available for nearly every platform and seems to be a
> fairly simple protocol.  I just wanted to solicit opinions on this kind
> of notification method.  The originating computer is going to be one of
> the Linux machines and I've been experimenting with sending by bash
> script which is nice, simple, and requires no libraries, just netcat.  I
> might later write up a small transmitter in C but I think bash will
> probably work well for now.

Netcat is a HUGE!!!!!!! security risk. I wouldn't ever use it beyond POC and
only on an air-gapped lab network.

What sort of notifications?  Desktops, system to system, system to specific
client?  system to any normal web-client?
Any chance this will every be wanted over the internet in the future?

And ... isn't growl commercial?  What is the fallback if it isn't available?
What about non-GUI client machines?

Is polling an option? If so, you could setup a REST web interface on a central
box that clients can push and pull from. REST means it is trivial to make a
client via a bash+curl script.

XMMP? More effort to use (only slightly), but extremely flexible.

Or place the messages into a file that every client has read access from. KISS
does work after all.

What are the authentication needs?

What are the encryption needs? Anything sensitive involved .. even in the future?



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