Is there a imbedded command (Solaris v8 ksh) that will send an administrative alert/alarm. Or is it just triggering a mail message via shell script? If no, is there a good open-source code someone knows about?
Thanks so much in advance for any replies.

...Gozer13

Hi,

If you just want to send mail from a shell script, please navigate to our FAQ area

Our Home Page > Network Computing Topics > Answers to Frequently Asked Questions > How do I send email?

You can do simple things like
echo "Alert - whoop whoop - server explosion" | mailx -s "WARNING!" mradmin@mydomain.com
but the faq will show you how to do more including sending attachments, etc....

As for open source software... Under Linux http://www.smsclient.org/ can be used to send SMS alerts to pagers/cellphones, and as the homepage states "This software has been written and tested on Linux however a number of users have reported success running it under both AIX and Solaris" - so with some luck you might be one of those "number of users"

Cheers
ZB

Mail is cool, but is that the only option? Is there any way to send popup alerts, etc.?

I use kdialog under Linux (with KDE) for this... If your build of Solaris has Gnome, you could give gdialog a whirl. You'll have to google around for it if it's not installed on your system and compile from source.

Cheers
ZB