[CentOS] managing a rack full of centos servers

[Devin Reade]

--On Tuesday, July 19, 2011 08:45:54 PM -0700 cooleyr at gmail.com wrote:
> On Jul 19, 2011 6:48 PM, "Jay Leafey" <jay.leafey at mindless.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I usually use SSH keys in conjunction with ClusterSSH
>
> In the same vein, I instead recomend pdsh.

Another variant that has been around a long time is pconsole.
	<http://freshmeat.net/projects/pconsole>

This is a tool for executing the same command on many similar
machines at once, and doesn't require anything to be on the 
target machines other than ssh.  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.

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).  pconsole is more intended
for concurrent ad-hoc changes.

The only thing to keep in mind with pconsole is screen real-estate.
You can have your slave xterms small (like 40x4), but if you have
more nodes than you can get slave xterms on your screen at one time,
it's less effective.

Devin