Remote Linux Administration

[klosie]

My company is considering deploying a Linux box at each of our 100 branch office locations as a network device for network monitoring. I however am concerned about managing all of them easily.

Can someone point me in the direction of a way to manage several boxes easily? Ideally I want to be able to update software, configurations, etc. on all or many of them all at once without having to log into each one individually.

[kam]

ssh is the way to go. You could first make a script of what you want to do, then make a script that connects to every computer via ssh and runs the first script. :) Of course, if they are all need radically different configurations, then you've got a problem.

[adikgede]

It really depends on what you wan't to do. I think that you are going to be looking at setting up cron on the remote hosts to do what you wan't.

Sift through the piles of ISP/Hosting software you might find something that already does what you want to do.

This Project
http://freshmeat.net/projects/autoup/
This Category:
http://freshmeat.net/browse/253/?topic_id=253

Typing at one console and executing on many hosts. I have seen that done over at bitkeeper/bitmover (Larry McVoy) but I don't know if that is software that is being distributed.

[klosie]

Thanks for your help, I'll look into it some more.

[Kaligraphic]

I'll bet you could make the machines ssh into a central server as a cron job and download and run a 'script of the day'. You could put the commands you want run into the script, and it would clear out automatically after the scheduled download. A theoretical version of this is:

You add commands to script.next during the day.
every day at midnight, script.real is rm'ed/mv'ed and script.next becomes script.real. (a new, empty script.next is created as a placeholder)
every morning, say, between 3am and 4am, the 100 machines individually pick up their script.real, and run it. the output is logged and mailed back to you.
return mails are campared to a list of the machines to make sure that all are accounted for, and any differences in the output are, of course, brought to your attention immediately. (in case something's broken)

that ought to automate things enough to seriously lighten the repetitive keystrokes. (I'd give them a spread of pick-up times so that the central server doesn't have 100 incoming connections all asking for the same file at the same time. It probably wouldn't be a problem, I just wouldn't like it.)

[klosie]

Thanks! That is almost exactly what I was considering doing. I hadn’t gotten as far as sending the logs back and red flagging problems. Good Call!

I think that I'm going to have to store some extra variables on each machine for example a branch office code or something similar. This shouldn't be a problem; I just thought I would mention it for posterity.

[dkirby_jwa]

Try webmin. www.webmin.com
It has a cluster function. If you haven't used this, it really is a remarkable piece of freeware. I'm not sure you could do remote admin on all the servers at once, but you sure can do it from one computer.

dk