PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tags mail & ssh

Many times, you want to execute a command not only on one server, but also on several servers. For example, find out * Version of kernel * Version of Apache web server * Update static html or images files on all web servers via rsync * Find out user information, server information, memory usage etc * Security/patch checking tentakel I have already covered how to execute commands on multiple Linux or UNIX servers via shell script. The disadvantage of script is commands do not run in parallel on all servers. However, several tools exist to automate this procedure in parallel. With the help of tool called tentakel, you run distributed command execution. It is a program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel using ssh (it supports other methods too). Main advantage is you can create several sets of servers according requirements. For example webserver group, mail server group, home servers group etc. The command is executed in parallel on all servers in this group (time saving). By default, every result is printed to stdout (screen). The output format can be defined for each group.

SSH has numerous uses beyond just logging into a remote system. In particular, SSH allows you to forward ports from one machine to another, tunnelling traffic through the secure SSH connection. This provides a convenient means of accessing a service hosted behind a firewall, or one blocked by an outgoing firewall. However, forwarding an individual port still requires you to change where your program connects, telling it to use a non-standard port on localhost rather than the standard port on the remote machine, and it requires a separate port forward for each machine you want to access. Dynamic port forwarding via SOCKS provides a more convenient alternative. The examples in this article assume that you reside behind a restrictive firewall which does not allow outgoing SMTP connections except to a designated mail server. You want to connect to a different mail server, mail.example.net, on port 25. You have an SSH account on a machine shell.example.org, which does not reside within the restrictive firewall and can thus access port 25 on mail.example.net.