alternative to Clusterssh for managing multiple SSH server

Question

Is there any alternative to Clusterssh,pssh etc? to manage multiple ssh based servers through one interface? one weakness in Clusterssh is that my servers use key based authentication, with passhprase to login, and there is no way to login to servers using the private key.

Is there any alternative available which supports authentication with Private keys?

Answer 1

Take a look on Rundeck - http://rundeck.org/

Answer 2

I prefer shmux for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel.

Answer 3

You should also look at MCollective, which is probably the best and most flexible way to interact with multiple servers in real-time. It is a bit of an undertaking to set up correctly and may be a bit over the top for your needs, but it certainly beats pssh, Clusterssh and all other SSH-based solutions. And once you have it in place there is probably nothing you can't do with it, provided you know a bit of Ruby.

Answer 4

The bash prompt works for simple things:

make a list of servers in servers.txt, one line per server.

then do:

$ while read $server; do ssh user@$server "command args"; done < servers.txt

Answer 5

1. Fabric

   Define your tasks first:

   from fabric.api import *
   
   @parallel
   @hosts('192.168.3.118', '192.168.6.142')
   
   def hostname():
       run('hostname')
   

   Then executing via the fab command-line tool:

   $ fab -f /path/to/.py/file hostname
   [192.168.3.118] Executing task 'hostname'
   [192.168.6.142] Executing task 'hostname'
   [192.168.6.142] run: hostname
   [192.168.3.118] run: hostname
   [192.168.6.142] out: SVR040-6142
   
   [192.168.3.118] out: SVR040-3118.localdomain
   
   
   Done.
   

2. Gnome Connection Manager
3. PAC Manager

Answer 6

You can go whole hog and install a configuration management system like Puppet or Chef. You haven't mentioned how many nodes you're actually trying to manage, so this might be overkill, but, certainly, you can centrally control a lot of machines this way. If you're small right now, but are growing, you may also want to set up, say, Chef, before you get that much bigger.

If you need to run ad hoc commands over a specific set of nodes, you can do something like knife ssh 'roles:webserver' 'hostname' (knife is the command line tool for chef) to run the hostname command for all nodes that have the webserver role.