Clusterssh: control several ssh sessions via a single interface
December 9th, 2007 edited by TinchoArticle submitted by Maurizio Pedraglio. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!
Clusterssh is a graphical utility that allows you to open several ssh connections and execute commands simultaneously in all of them. I find it powerful in many cases, for example when I’ve to perform a dist-upgrade on many different servers.
It provides a small window to control the sessions, and one xterm window for each one of them. Here are some screen shots using it on Ubuntu and Gnome 2.20.
You can open a ssh session simply clicking on “Host” and then “Add Host”.
Type user@server in the “Add Host” window and a new shell will appear in a new window.
You’ll be able to open n different ssh session versus n hosts. You should focus the input box in the controlling window to send commands to all the shells at once.
If you want to execute a command only in a single host, simply focus the right shell. The other shells won’t receive anything, and the command will take effect only on the selected host.
If you want to detach a shell from the parallel command execution, simple uncheck it in the “Host” menu. In the case below commands will be executed on host 192.168.15.104 and localhost1 but not on localhost
Others commands available: use “Toggle active state“ to uncheck all host; “Retile” allows you to reorganise windows in the desktop. Clusterssh can also be launched from the command line, just type in a shell:
cssh serverA serverB … serverN
Clusterssh has been available both in Debian and Ubuntu since a long time ago
December 9th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Something similar can be done with konsole (part of KDE)… Check menu items under “View” (not sure how it is named in english). The only difference is that seems like there is no way to show terminal windows tiled (konsole uses tabs).
December 9th, 2007 at 10:21 am
I evaluated clusterssh for this task but for my requirements Clusterm was better.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Clusterm homepage:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterm
December 9th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
It would have been useful to compare to similar programs such as tentakel. A list of similar programs available at http://tentakel.biskalar.de/similar/
December 10th, 2007 at 12:53 am
You may also want to look at pconsole, which has also been a part of debian for a long time.
December 10th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
There’s also omnitty at http://omnitty.sourceforge.net/ that does something similar in a text environment.
December 10th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
This seems pretty pointless. KDE’s “konsole” program can already do this sort of thing, to more than just separate ssh sessions. Open up a bunch of tabs to where you want the commands to go, pick a tab to be the “master”, then do View->”Send Input to All Sessions”.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Tim G: not everyone uses KDE …
December 14th, 2007 at 5:33 am
And the example program from the expect distribution http://expect.nist.gov/example/multixterm.man.html
March 25th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Or there is mhssh, available on http://piggledy.org/ (on the bottom)
That is simple, but efficient
October 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
In the title ’serveral’ should, I believe, be ’several’.
October 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Heh, fixed now.
Thanks!