Write a remote managing script

Question

I need to be able to locally run a script that will connect to various servers and run commands on them. What is the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Personally, I would use Capistrano. It's friendly and written in Ruby and they already did all of the heavy lifting for you.

From Wikipedia:

Capistrano is a utility and framework for executing commands in parallel on multiple remote machines, via SSH.

Answer 2

you can run a command using ssh hostname command. If you have an entire script you need to execute, first use scp to transfer it to the remote host, then ssh to execute it.

scp script.sh host:script.sh
ssh host ./script.sh

Answer 3

I would use ssh with key authentication, I believe ssh has a way to make sure that certain accounts can only log in from certain IP's so I would limit it to that because you might not want to set a passphrase on the keys (you could use a key manager to avoid that but it has limitations too)

Answer 4

What about using configuration management like puppet or chef? This is maybe a little over the top for only one script, but if you need several such scripts it might be worth to consider.

Answer 5

A quickie bash 'for' loop might be easiest, perhaps something like:

for h in host1 host2 host3
do 
   echo $h
   ssh user@$h "ps -ef"
done

Of course, cfengine/puppet/chef/capistrano are better configuration management options. If you wanted to interactively send commands to the various shells, clusterm (http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterm/) is a solid choice too.

Answer 6

Puppet and Chef are "pull" systems and I've found that a complementary "push" system implemented using Capistrano, Fabric, or ssh(1) in a for-loop is necessary. Of course, that means public keys in place for authentication, too; fortunately, those can be managed by Puppet or Chef.

Answer 7

I have been pretty happy with a shell script called dssh.sh that utilizes ssh to communicate with many machines simultaneously. It can execute the same command across lots of machines simultaneously and wait for them all to exit before returning. To download and learn more about it, the best reference I have found is the BASH Cures Cancer blog.