dsh: dancer's shell gives you power over multiple Macs

There is a feature in iTerm that lets you send commands to multiple windows. I like it because I can chain a tail -f of the log after the command and check each host to make sure nothing went wonkey.

I was going to suggest looking to see if fink has a package, but oops, looks like Godaddy's parked the domain name now. sad :(

There is also pdsh, for running it in parallel

yeah I built a very robust perl script that does this with many very nice options about 2.5 years ago. I update it and add features frequently so it's become quite a nice tool.

This is a definite need for many admins tho so kudos!

I made a kind of similar tool at my work on my mac (and linux of course)

it uses texts lists but also LDAP to get list of computers to ssh-execute the command.

for example, I can ask "all machines in the room 305" and it uses ldap to know what are the ip of the computer in the 305 room.

I made also little scripts and a website (for admins colleagues) to manage my custom directory of computers.

What is the port name? 'sudo install port dsh' doesn't seem to work

Well, cool idea. "But" we've been doing that already for some time thanks to the Ruby on Rails deployment tool "Capistrano". One of its feature is exactly a command line "cap shell" that allows us to run shell commands in multiple machines (and check its output). It also uses ssh, by the way.

I used dsh a lot when I was administering a beowulf cluster. Glad to hear that it's working on the Mac. Here's a quick tip: set up a public/private keypair within ssh for the user you're planning to use, and make sure you can ssh over with no password prompt before trying to use dsh. Typing the password over and over again is no fun.

Interesting. I have a primitive version myself, basically just a wrapper on "for host in ...; do ssh $host $*; done". I called it "blast". I'll have to give this a try.