Due to some security protocols we use, I could not merely use a parallel tool like pssh. In fact, I (several years ago now) wrote an Expect script to be able to easily log into any server in our environment, which uses two separate passwords to log in to any particular server.
I ran into terminator s a while ago, and love its features--especially grouping. That allow me to connect to multiple server, group them together, and execute commands in parallel without any extra typing. Works great.
With my new Hadoop responsibilities, I log into the same group of servers, perform some task, and then log out. With Layouts, I can merely click an icon on my screen, and a terminator window pops open, divides itself into multiple sessions, each session logs into a server within the cluster, and sets me up for whatever I need to do.
It cuts preparation time for accomplishing routine tasks to zero.
There is nothing like a really good single purpose tool. Once you learn how to use them they are indispensable.
Not many of your career management wienies get that.
Wow. What else do you do in those windows?
I used to use gnome-terminal a lot when I had a similar situation where I had to access a lot of servers at once. I had a script that would fire up a terminal that had many tabs, with each tab connecting to a different terminal. Was pretty sweet. I could connect to 20 or more terminals at once in seconds. Since everything was opened predictably, it was easy to find the specific one I needed because it was always in the same place. I separated dev, test, and prod in separate windows so it was somewhat organized that way. Also, you could send a set it up so that when you were typing in one terminal on a window, and it would echo what you were typing in all tabs in that window. It was pretty cool and very efficient. Unfortunately, my setup these days won’t allow that.
Way back in the dark ages when I was working on HP-3000 minicomputers running MPE-V, they had a really interesting networking setup. From one system, I’d be able to issue a command and it would remote me into the other 11 systems I supported, then give me my prompt back. From there you could hop back and forth from any system, and could even daisy-chain if you wanted. At the time, it was the slickest thing I’d ever seen. Once you had all the remotes set up, you could copy data to/from almost as if all the systems were just one big device.