Thursday, February 28, 2013

net send for windows vista/7/8

Remember back in the day of NT/2000/XP, where you could type
net send computername some message here?

If you tried to do a net send with any version of windows since xp (vista/7/8), you've probably noticed that Microsoft removed net send entirely (with xp sp2, they disabled the service, but you could easily re-enable it).

Microsoft probably did this for security/anti-spam.  Back in the days when I was in college, I would often be getting net send spam.

You can use msg.exe which will send a message to a terminal server (has to be a server vision of windows), or to display a popup on your local computer.  If we combine that with psexec we have a way to replicate the functionality,

psexec \\remotecomputer msg.exe * /server:remotecomputer some message here

However this doesn't work very well if you have many computers (say a whole office?) that you need to send a message to.
So here's a script to make it easier if you have multiple computers:

rem --------beginning of netsend7.bat-------------------------


@echo off

rem this is for sending messages to computers using psexec and msg.exe

rem instead of net send. as net send doesn't exist in windows after xp

rem NEEDS PSEXEC.EXE in the the path or same folder.




if "%~1" == "" goto error




rem need to convert the list of computers

rem from comma to space delimited

for /f "tokens=*" %%c in ('echo %~1') do set comps=%%c

echo the computers are %comps%




rem extract the message from the command line

for /f "tokens=1,* delims= " %%p in ('echo %*') do set msg=%%q

echo the message is: %msg%




rem call the subroutine for each message.

for %%c in (%comps%) do call :submsg %%c







goto end




:submsg

set subcomp=%1

rem echo messaging %subcomp%, with message %msg%

psexec \\%subcomp% msg.exe * /server:%subcomp% %msg%

exit /b




:error

echo make sure to include quotes at the beginning and

echo end of the list of computers, but not the message,

echo usage "comp1,comp2,comp3,etc..." some message to the computers




rem check for psexec

where /q "$path:psexec.exe"

if %errorlevel% == 0 goto end

echo .

if not exist psexec.exe echo you need to have psexec.exe somewhere in the path.




:end


rem --------end of netsend7.bat-------------------------



If you want to accomplish the same thing without psexec, there is a guy who figured out a method using vbscript and setting a remoteRPC key in the registry on every computer you're messaging to:


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