A series of small scripts designed to allow a virtual machine to send alerts back to a host machine.

Many developers run their code in a development environment on a virtual machine. This has many advantages, but one problem is that long-running tasks have no way of alerting the user on the host machine when they have completed.

These scripts install a lightweight server on the host machine that listens for requests from the VM and runs a notification program on the host to alert the user.

1. The following files should be placed somewhere on your PATH:

• notify-host-server.bat
• notify-host-server/ (This must be in the same directory as notify-host-server.bat)
• notifu.exe (This can be replaced with any other Windows notification system)

2. The scripts in the vm directory must be sent to your VM.

• notify-host should be placed somewhere on your PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin)
• notify.sh should be included in your .bashrc file: . /path/to/notify.sh and you should re-source .bashrc from your command line: . ~/.bashrc

3. If you'd like to be able to start/stop the host's server using Powershell, copy the ps-notify-host directory to your Powershell Modules directory (e.g. %HOME%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules). Then add Import-Module ps-notify-host to the top of your Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 file.

This does not automatically start the notify-host server when you start Powershell. To do that, simply run

Start-NotifyHostServer

This starts a background job that runs the server.

To stop the server, run

Stop-NotifyHostServer

First, ensure that the server is running on the host machine. Installation instructions are provided for Powershell only:

Start-NotifyHostServer

When performing long-running tasks on the virtual machine, wrap any command with the notify function:

notify mysql -e "select * from bigtable" > outfile

This will cause an alert to appear on the host when the query completes.

Messages can be sent directly to the host machine by running:

notify-host -m "Message" [-p "VM Says:"] [-t <info|warn|error>]