SAS is responsible for a huge number of users in our organization, and there is not an easy way for administrators to post messages to users upon connection to our back end services across all the various UI's. It would also be nice to have a "stub" service that could be left running for maintenance notification.
It would be good upon connection to a Meta server to have a way to post a message before, and after authentication in a standard way.
It would also be good to provide real-time announcements.
Message pre-authentication: "There will be maintenance on Saturday from 4:00pm to 7:00am."
Message post-authentication: "Due to issues with the NAS interface, there may be slow connections when browsing the file system."
Real time/Flash messages: "The system will go down in 45 minutes for patching."
(in this scenario it would be nice to stop allowing new connections, and then gracefully quit running sessions to acquiesce)
It would also be nice to provide a system is down for maintenance message. Perhaps the client could default to checking a simple web service on the meta server for maintenance notification.
HTTP/HTTPS providing a response of: Maintenance: "The SAS environment is currently down for maintenance; SAS will be available by 7am ET."
Client could show "The SAS environment is currently down for maintenance; SAS will be available by 7am ET."
If you use a simple HTTP/HTTPS interface, then you can use a DNS failover or a simple web service on the host to provide information when the service is down. (Even a simple Python http service 'cd /sas/maintenance; python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80')
