[TriLUG] Issuing a command to multiple machines simultaneously

[Paul McLanahan]

Thanks for all of the excellent suggestions. I can't believe I didn't
find any of these on my own. My GoogleFu must be horribly rusty.

In any case... here is my progress so far.

I installed Tentakel from their SVN repo. There are RPMs, but it's not
in the APT sources. I read that the SVN trunk version was the only one
that supported python 2.5, which is what I have installed. The install
was simple (make; sudo make install), and it works as advertised. The
config was very easy, especially for my simple situation.

The only (sort of) headache was that I need to run some tasks that
require root (sudo), and since there is no interactive mode, I had to
allow a user in my sudoers file privileges w/ NOPASSWD set. I also had
to setup a shared-key SSH login to localhost for the machine from
which I'm running Tantakel, b/c it apparently uses SSH even for local
commands.

Apart from that, it works great. It does wait until all machines have
returned before displaying results, which can be a little annoying b/c
you have no indication of progress. I'm sure that's because it's
sending the commands to the machines in parallel, but some progress
output would be nice.

After that, I decided to try dsh. The install was easier only because
it's in the Hardy apt sources. The features and interface are almost
exactly the same as Tentakel. The setup was easier b/c I already had
all of the SSH and sudo stuff worked out, and the config was just as
easy. I like it a little better so far because it returns results as
it gets them, and it's easy to configure it to prepend every line of
output w/ the host name. Tentakel printed out a header with that info
before each host's output, but when there is a lot of output it's hard
to keep track of at which host you're looking.

For my situation, I'm not sure that either of these programs are much
better than just writing a bash loop like Maarten suggested. However,
for the foreseeable future I think I'll be sticking with dsh. I'll
post again if that changes.

Thanks again!

Paul