On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:07:06 -0600 Devin Reade <gdr at 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.