Making terminal session on production server look unique

Question

I have several terminal windows open and would like to make the terminal session on the production server look very different from my local machine and staging servers to reduce the chance that I type something on the production server by mistake.

Does anybody have some tips for doing this?

Edit: Just want to clarify - I meant that I have many xterm sessions open and want to disambiguate between them. - Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are talking about remote desktop. I usually change the background or use BG Info so I can at a quick glance know which box I am on.

Answer 2

change the colors of the prompt. I use this to distinguish between root and users, but you can easily color-code by host. (green for local, yellow for dev, red for production!)

here's a tutorial for bash: http://www.hypexr.org/bash%5Ftutorial.php#colors

YMMV if you use a different shell, but "$SHELL prompt color tutorial" should find it on Google.

Answer 3

Thanks for the suggestions everybody. I ended up taking the following approach:

I used byobu (https://launchpad.net/byobu) to configure GNU screen. I made screen start on login so that there will always be a red bar at the bottom of the terminal like this:

Answer 4

Here's a discussion with several options you can use as a starting point but no Holy Grail one true answer: How do I change the background color of xterm permanently?

Answer 5

One thing missing is changing your prompt! Using something like this:

root@missioncritical ~:

is subtle but might be enough of a reminder (in addition to the color schemes). As always, exercising caution and using the 'hostname' command are never a bad idea if you are doing something that could potentially break something anywhere.

Answer 6

Are you talking about Windows Terminal Server? If so, BgInfo will print unique info about your box right onto dekstop.