DWall: Distributed Wall


The people of Soda.Berkeley.EDU have masterd the use of wall(1). /bin/wall comes standard with mosts systems, but its casual use is strongly discouraged. Not on soda! In fact, we've rewritten, optimized, and added feature after feature to wall.

Marco Nicosia had the idea of creating a system whereby many hosts can receive walls from each other simultaneously. He has been working on what he calls CNWall for the past two years.

I decided to work on a similar project. My project involves a wall server, which broadcasts messages from a client to all the other clients. Each client will be a machine running a dwalld, which accepts connections from local dwall clients. Users run dwall and supply their message, dwall sends the message to the local dwalld, which forwards the message to the wall server, which broadcasts the message to each one of its clients.


I'm pretty much done with the broadcast engine. I still need to work on the protocol between the clients and the servers.
April 22. David Chia and Brion Moss are planning on making a version of dwall for the their CS268 project.

I'd like to see how it turns out!


May 20. I've written a version of dwall based on