Net Send becomes MSG

OK, so it's not news, but NET SEND no longer is the favoured way to send messages to machines, and MSG is the new method - unfortunately it's not as easy to use, and by default doesn't even work!

NET SEND is built into SQL which is a problem when that's used as an alternative to email for getting alerts.  Getting it to use MSG instead can raise other problems too.

Basic syntax to use MSG to send a message to a user / workstation :- the main issue here is you need to know what machine the user is on, but unlike netsend, you can at least configure it to auto close, so you don't come in at 8am and find 5000 popups to click close on.

MSG * /SERVER:workstation001 /TIME:60 Hello I'm testing

Next issue is you are likely to get this error:

Error opening Terminal server Workstation001
Error [1722]:The RPC server is unavailable.

It seems that the latest versions of Windows, by default, do not allow the relevant RPC call

To fix, you need to open regedit, navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer

Open the AllowRemoteRPC registry entry, and change the value to 1

You should now be able to use the MSG command.

You can use this to get SQL alerts as follows:
Create a file (e.g. msg.cmd file) with entries for each persons machine you want notified, such as:
MSG * /SERVER:workstation001 /TIME:60 %1
MSG * /SERVER:workstation002 /TIME:60 %1

Create a SQL agent job that calls that file via a CmdExec type step, along with [A-MSG], such as
\\network\DBA\msg.cmd "$(ESCAPE_NONE(A-MSG)) FROM $(ESCAPE_NONE(SRVR)) "

I've then configured alerts (e.g. backupfailed, replication issues etc.) on failure response to execute this job.