On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:07:06 -0600 Devin Reade gdr@gno.org wrote:
You get one master xterm, a bunch of slave xterms, and you can either type in the master to affect all nodes or selectively type in the slaves.
Yes, but I don't want a bunch of XTerms. I can slide my phone open, ssh in and manage my cluster using pdsh. And I've written plenty of serious scripts using pdsh/pdcp, which obviously wouldn't work with XTerms popping up.
It should be considered as complementing the automated config management tools like cfengine et al, not as a replacement for them (they're doing different jobs).
That's not entirely fair. A little shell scripting and pdsh and pdcp can certainly do everything cfengine/puppet can do, and obviously more that they can't. Some of it may be a bit more clumsy this way, though it has other advantages like being "atomic" so to speak, and not lumbering around, slowly putting things in-sync.
I don't want to sound like a zealot by any means. It's got plenty of marks against it. But it most definitely works, in some very demanding circumstances, and it still hasn't become a problem, even as we keep asking it to do ever-more.