ClusterSSH

ClusterSSH – a perfect tool for dealing with cluster of servers:

ClusterSSH is a tool for making the same change on multiple servers at the same time. The ‘cssh’ command opens an administration console and an xterm to all specified hosts. Any text typed into the administration console is replicated to all windows. All windows may also be typed into directly.

This tool is intended for (but not limited to) cluster administration where the same configuration or commands must be run on each node within the cluster. Performing these commands all at once via this tool ensures all nodes are kept in sync.

There are whole lot of different automation tools these days and there are bunch of common practices, but sometimes we just need to deal with servers manually. For the past month I am dealing a few clusters of similar servers where I need to run same things and while the cluster is still under construction, I have to put more things on each node and do it manually. Today I got too lazy to login to each one to run few commands so I start googling around for a nice solution. In my case, I can’t use something like pssh, as my commands involve typing in passwords and doing some interactive things, so cluster ssh is just the right tool! As per description from their web site – it opens terminal per each server as well as gives a place to type a command that will be replicated to all those terminals. Very handy and strongly advisable to any system administrator. In addition it allows to define different clusters in a config file to be referred to later on.

Short update

Just a short update on what is going up.

First of all had a week of vacations with lots of beer, good food, fun and so. These days a lot of work and interesting projects.

Playing around with Zabbix – looks really nice, like it a bit more then Nagios, which I used a lot in the past years, but still missing few things, which I will probably mention in a separate post about Zabbix later on, when I have more experience.

Got to learn a lot of new things about networking in general (reading RFCs really helps) as well as networking in Linux. Feel like more things are coming for sure and I like this. Also found a bunch of nice tools to troubleshoot different problems.

In short – all is fine, but working for an IT company with lots of interesting projects, experienced people around and friendly team keeps me pretty busy.

Hopefully will come up with few detailed technical posts later on, when all other things will  be sorted out.