Is there a way to send a short message to all computers in a windows network?

Question

we have a small network of < 10 machines connected together with a DSL router. i can see the list of machines in 'network' in explorer (windows 7). i tried using the msg command,set the AllowRemoteRPC key in registry for my machine, ran the command prompt with admin privilages as directed here MSG command in Windows 7

am i heading in the wrong direction? does the 'msg' command work only for windows domain controller logins? is there any other way, without installing additional programs , to send messages to machines connected in LAN?

Answer 1

msg works on all systems with Terminal Services (which is part of Windows since XP). However, it can only send messages to a single computer, using msg /server:hostname * Hi!

• You may need to reboot after changing AllowRemoteRPC.

• Also test if it works using qwinsta /server:hostname, which uses the same RPC.

• Use this script to call msg for each computer:

  @echo off
  setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
  for /f "tokens=1" %%a in ('net view') do (
      set host=%%a
      if "!host:~0,2!"=="\\" (
          msg /server !host:~2! * < message.txt
      )
  )
  

• The * in msg examples above can also be a session name as displayed by qwinsta (use "console" to refer to the physically attached monitor/keyboard), or an user name.

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Previous versions of Windows had a NetBIOS-based "Messenger Service", which could send messages to a user, computer, or workgroup. However, this has been removed from Windows Vista and 7. So any suggestions involving "net send" should be ignored.

Answer 2

I think the command you want is "net send". I haven't had to use it in years so hopefully it still works as I remember. If you want to hit everyone with it, you'd do something like net send /users Your message here.