On occasion I will use the ‘net send’ command to fire off a quick message to anyone working on our servers. Usually in the form of a script that will notify everyone I am about to reboot. I was surprised to find it didn’t work at all when running under Vista (Well not that surprised)

After some digging around I found that Vista now has a new way to do this – the MSG command (I suspect the msg command has been around before that…but this is the first Windows OS where net send has been removed). Here is the syntax:

MSG {username | sessionname | sessionid | @filename | *}
    [/SERVER:servername] [/TIME:seconds] [/V] [/W] [message]   username            Identifies the specified username.
  sessionname         The name of the session.
  sessionid           The ID of the session.
  @filename           Identifies a file containing a list of usernames,
                      sessionnames, and sessionids to send the message to.
  *                   Send message to all sessions on specified server.
  /SERVER:servername  server to contact (default is current).
  /TIME:seconds       Time delay to wait for receiver to acknowledge msg.
  /V                  Display information about actions being performed.
  /W                  Wait for response from user, useful with /V.
  message             Message to send.  If none specified, prompts for it
                      or reads from stdin.

If you wanted to send a single message to the server named ‘Server2003′ it would look like this:

C:\msg /server:Server2003 console “Server will be rebooted shortly – Please save your work asap!”

Now I can reboot my servers without giving someone a nasty surprise

Like this article? Then sign up for my newsletter to get free tips and software sent right to your inbox once a week. Like you, I hate spam – I will never spam, or sell your email address.