Preparing our institute’s cluster for an OpenStack installation I got into the situation where I had to manually configure several servers in the same way. Of course, since repeating the same terminal commands isn’t all that fun, I went searching for a tool to simplify this. Enter Cluster SSH.
To install Cluster SSH, simply do a:
sudo apt-get install clusterssh
And using it is equally simple:
cssh hostname1 hostname2 hostname3 hostname4
This command will start 4 terminals and scale and position their windows automatically to fit your screen. You can then issue text into the main CSSH text form to transmit it directly to all the servers and see the results in their corresponding windows. It is also possible to enter commands directly to a certain terminal or use CSSH’s menu to select a subset.
If you don’t need anything interactive (meaning, you just want to enter lots of commands for lots of servers), then the “plink” utility also goes a long a way. It’s also great for repetitive tasks on multiple servers.
Nice, I’ll keep it in mind. In the mean time, I also discovered a nice Python library Fabric that also does a similar thing.
very good thanks
Great!
I like it, it will save me a lot of time! 🙂