Google Alternative To ‘DSH’ ?

Looks like Mikal and Andrew have come up with an interesting take on the age-old cluster/distributed SSH tool, like LLNL’s good old pdsh. But the twist is this (from their FAQ):

You run a utility (cssh) giving a couple of server names as parameters, and then xterms opens up to each server with an extra “console” window. Anything typed into the console is replicated into each server window (so you can edit the same file on N machines at the same time).

It should work on any POSIX system (including, they claim, CygWin).

4 thoughts on “Google Alternative To ‘DSH’ ?

  1. “You run a utility (cssh) giving a couple of server names as parameters, and then xterms opens up to each server with an extra “console” window. Anything typed into the console is replicated into each server window (so you can edit the same file on N machines at the same time).”

    Um, Sun Cluster software has been doing that trick for years. I first saw it in 1995ish.

  2. Yeah, but if it only runs on Solaris it’s not a lot of use to most folks!

    In the same vein IBM’s CSM can do some great stuff, but again it’s not open source and it’s tied to specific Linux distributions (which annoys me continuously). Oh, and it uses Java, which means it eats RAM and not portable to platforms for which a JVM hasn’t been released.. 🙁

  3. > it uses Java, which means it eats RAM and not portable to platforms for which a JVM hasn’t been released

    Name five. 😎 Really, I don’t much look outside my space of MacOS, NetBSD and Solaris, so if you can cite five keyboard-driven platforms – not distros, platforms – which lack some form of JVM and each of which you use > 5% of your total time spent in front of a computer per month, I would be interested.

    Apart from anything else I am interested to know if you’re still stuck using those crusty and ancient Alpha boxes, and if so, why? 🙂

  4. The whole point is that we had to get rid of perfectly good Alphas which would have done really well as Grid boxes and replace them with PC based systems because Globus uses Java and Java on Linux/Alpha is dead. 🙁

    Not to mention that FreeBSD had to jump through hoops a year or so ago when Sun revoked their license to redistribute Java (as they did to everyone who held that specific license apparently) and then didn’t respond to their attempts to renegotiate it (though I guess they must have finally gotten around to it as they are redistributing it again).

    Still, we got good money for those Alpha’s, they’ve still got excellent floating point performance and are in great demand second hand – the hard part was having to crowbar a couple of hundred users off them!

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