The Crane Has Landed

I have been playing around with a way to get my Ubuntu box (that is running VLC on startup to stream our satellite TV across the network) to notify other boxes that it is awake and broadcasting. This is so that my wife can start the box up from a WOL script on the kitchen PC and then, once it is booted up, turn on the modded Xbox and run XBMC to connect to the stream and pick up TV downstairs.

Nice enough.

I managed to get it working using the following steps.

1. On the PC that broadcasts TV, I added passwordless SSH (via this link) for the user that the kitchen PC runs under.
2. On the kitchen PC, I created a script in the /usr/bin called notifier that has the following in it:
   export DISPLAY=:0 && export XAUTHORITY=/home/[KITCHEN COMPUTER USERNAME]/.Xauthority && sudo -u [KITCHEN COMPUTER USERNAME] /usr/bin/notify-send "TV is now broadcasting" 2>&1.

   Most of this is via this page.

3. After adding the same user to the TV PC, I have a line in the TV PC /etc/rc.local that says
   su [KITCHEN COMPUTER USERNAME] -c notifyKitchen
   The notifyKitchen is a /usr/bin script that simply says
   ssh [KITCHEN COMPUTER USERNAME]@[KITCHEN COMPUTER] 'notifier'.

Done and done. When the TV PC boots, it calls this command and the Kitchen PC gets a pop-up notification that TV is running.