How do I remotely execute scripts on multiple servers, mix output

Question

Hi I'm looking for a piece of software or some sort of technique that would enable me to do following in one terminal window:

• Take as input a list of ssh-enabled machines with login, password and script path information, something like this:

  login:[email protected]/path/to/script/run.sh login:[email protected]/path/to/script/run.sh

• Open ssh connections to these machines and run the specified scripts remotely.

• Output from all the scripts should be piped to my local window.
• When I send a signal like Ctrl-C, I want to kill the remote scripts and then the connection. A massive plus would be if my machine goes down, the remote scripts are killed also.

A plus would be if I could use this in Cygwin terminal since that's what I use, but I'm open to anything that would get this done.

Answer 1

I assume you're using OpenSSH. It is deliberately difficult to programatically give a password to ssh, because it's typically a bad idea. Instead of using passwords, can you use public key authentication? If so, the following should do the trick:

for cmd in [email protected]:/path/to/script/run.sh [email protected]:/path/to/script/run.sh; do
    ssh ${cmd%%:*} ${cmd#*:}
done

Answer 2

You will need public key authentication, you will also need something like PSSH which is a python based tool for running multiple parallel ssh sessions.

https://code.google.com/p/parallel-ssh/

Answer 3

If you can write Perl, you should check Net::OpenSSH::Parallel.

It can log in the remote hosts using public key or password authentication and run the programmed tasks in parallel.