Jerry Geis wrote: > How do admins handle a situation with many boxes like 50 for example. > If I wish to tell 50 boxes to run a handful of commands - how is that done? > (I mean without actually logging into 1,2,3,4...X and executing the > commands) Depends what the commands have to do. For most of my management I use cfengine which runs hourly and can run things on classes of boxes. If I want to run something *right now* I use a simple script and ssh keys, and ssh-agent to automatically login to however many boxes I want and run the command. e.g. assuming the boxes have various names, create a text file that has all of their names and a simple 1-liner to iterate through the file and login to the systems, if they are all named similarly you can use something like seq to help e.g. for i in `seq -w 1 50`; do ssh username at myserver${i} "my command";done There are also tools like clusterssh which can run the commands in parallel. Never used them myself. nate