[SASAG] 5/12 Meeting: rshall – A Command-Line Tool for Managing Multiple Remote Hosts

[Ski Kacoroski]

Date: 	May 12th, 2011
Time: 	7pm
Place: 	EE1 Building (Electrical Engineering)
         Room 403
         University of Washington Campus
Directions: 	http://www.ee.washington.edu/about/contact.html
Subject: 	rshall: A Command-Line Tool for Managing Multiple
                 Remote Hosts
Presenter: 	Leon Towns-van Stauber

Once you’re managing more than a handful of Linux/UNIX boxes, a tool 
that lets you run commands on multiple hosts becomes pretty handy. When 
you’re responsible for dozens or more, such a tool is an indispensable 
productivity enhancer.

rshall makes it easy to run commands on many Linux or UNIX hosts on a 
network. The commands run in parallel, so output returns quickly and 
changes are nearly simultaneous. rshall has been in use for over ten 
years in a variety of environments, and is regularly used to administer 
hundreds of machines at a time. It’s great for ad hoc information 
gathering, and for making changes in the absence of a centralized 
configuration management system. It can also distribute files over a 
network, and supports running parallel MySQL queries to multiple 
database servers.

———-

Leon has been using and administering UNIX systems since 1990, and been 
employed as a full-time sysadmin since 1995. While he’s worked 
extensively with Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, and too many others to 
name, lately he’s been spending a lot of time with Linux working for 
Intelius in Bellevue, WA.

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check 
them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.