Learning DCOM

Administrative Alert

There are times when your application must notify the administrator or authorized personnel immediately. For example, you would want to do this when you detect that the local hard-disk has reached a low watermark of available space. Or as in the exercise that we’re about to embark upon, we want to immediately raise a red flag when we detect illegal users.

Windows NT comes with two services that handle this kind of notifications. These are the Messenger and Alerter services; in Windows NT 4.0, you can see these if you launch the Services applet in the Control Panel.^[101] In this section, you’ll learn how to take advantage of this operating system level of support. You need to learn an administrative task and a programming task:

1. We need to configure the workstation to generate administrative alerts, because if this is not done, your alert messages won’t be generated.

2. We’ll learn how to generate an administrative alert by using the NetAlertRaiseEx API function.

Administrative Alert Setup

Before you start coding, you need to learn how to configure the workstation so that administrative alerts will be generated. First, you need to start the Messenger and Alerter services. The machine that receives administrative alerts must run the Messenger service, and the machine that sends administrative alerts must run the Alerter service. To start these services, use the net start command or the Services applet found in the Control Panel. After you have done this, use the following ...