If you are a sysadmin, communicating with your users is an important aspect of your job. Phone, e-mail, SMS, and various service request systems are commonly used by most businesses. The problem with all these tools is that they require time and a certain degree of effort.

It is definitely important for a sysadmin to separate himself from the users with some bureaucracy: otherwise no work is going to be done, with all time being spent on the phone or reading e-mails. However, in any environment there is a particular class of users – application focals, network admins, database administrators – who can help the sysadmin to detect and troubleshoot a problem early before is becomes a major outage.

The following Korn shell script allows select users to contact you simply by typing your name and a brief message at the command line of a Unix server or workstation. This script has been written for Solaris but it can be easily modified for any other Unix operating environment.

#!/bin/ksh

# 2006-09-28
# krazyworks.com

TEXT=$(echo $*)

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# FUNCTIONS
#---------------------------------------------------------------

log() {
	LOG="$HOME/igor.log"
	TMP="/tmp/igor_log.tmp"
	LINELIM=1000 ; LINEBUF=50 ; (( LINEMAX = LINELIM + LINEBUF ))

	if [ ! -r "$LOG" ]
	then
		touch "$LOG"
	fi

	if [ -f "$LOG" ] && [ `wc -l "$LOG" | awk '{print $1}'` -gt $LINEMAX ]
	then
		cat "$LOG" | tail -$LINELIM > "$TMP"
		mv "$TMP" "$LOG"
	fi

	chmod 777 "$LOG"
}

#---------------------------------------------------------------

message() {
	if [ ! $TAIL ]
	then
		TAIL=1
	else
		(( TAIL = TAIL + 1 ))
	fi
	echo "`hostname`	`date +'%Y-%m-%d %T'`	$MSG" >> "$LOG"
	tail -1 "$LOG"
}

#---------------------------------------------------------------

configure() {
	USER=$(id | awk -F'(' '{print $2}' | awk -F')' '{print $1}')
        HOST=$(hostname)
	FROM="${USER}@${HOST}"
	DEST="your_email@host.domain your_pager@host.domain"
	SUBJ="Message from $USER on $HOST"
	MAIL="/bin/mailx"
	USERS="root oracle user1 user2 user3"

	if [ ! -x $MAIL ]
	then
		MSG=$(echo "Error: $MAIL executable not found!") ; message
		exit 1
	fi
}

#---------------------------------------------------------------

send() {
	if [ `echo $USERS | grep -c $USER` -gt 0 ]
	then
		echo "$TEXT" |  $MAIL -r "$FROM" -s "$SUBJ" "$DEST"
	else
		MSG=$(echo "Error: User $USER is not allowed to run this script!") ; message
		exit 1
	fi
}

#---------------------------------------------------------------

confirm() {
	MSG=$(echo "Your message saying - $TEXT - has been sent.") ; message
}

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# RUNTIME
#---------------------------------------------------------------

case `uname -s -r` in

# --- SunOS --------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.6")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.7")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.8")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.9")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.10")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	"SunOS 5.11")	log
			configure
			send
			confirm ;;
	# ----------------------------------
	*)		echo "`uname -s -r` is not supported by this script. Exiting..."
			exit 1 ;;
esac

Save this script as your name in a common executable directory like /usr/sbin. For example: /usr/sbin/Mike. Set file ownership to allow users to execute the file. You can use additional group ownership settings to further restrict access.

All a user would need to do to get your attention is to type something like:

> Mike please run the root.sh script so I can complete Oracle installation