Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source Distributed Shell Tools?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-of-you-with-many-boxen dept.

ColonelForbin74 asks: "While some may assume that most larger server clusters run advanced / custom software(i.e. Beowulf, cfengine, OSCAR), many of those stuck in the not-research-this-site-runs-production world know this simply isn't the case. Many people like myself are working with medium-to-large scale clusters with little help other than shell for() loops and some SSH trusted keys. What application-level tools are out there that might help SysAdmin / AppSupport types like myself run commands across a given cluster, push files out, etc? In my desperation to have some sort of tool in my toolbox, I've actually created one. However, I have a hard time believing this is the best thing out there, and would appreciate all the ideas and links I can get!"

4 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. heh... funny you should mention this.... by FireChipmunk · · Score: 1, Funny

    We have many extra Windows XP machines around here, which idle around most of the time.

    We needed some machines for running stress testing against our network servers, but we didn't have enough horse power to run a pure linux based clustering/distributed stress client.

    I looked around abit, like you, and found there wasn't much.

    Because of this I have written some hackish python code that basicly creates a cross platform distributed and self-updating cluster.

    We use it to run our cross platform stress test application across many machines, without forcing these machines to be formated to linux.. etc.

    I plan on releasing these scripts as open source sometime soon.

    Look for them on Freshmeat and http://open.cyanworlds.com

    -chip

    1. Re:heh... funny you should mention this.... by babbage · · Score: 2, Funny
      Interestingly, that sort of thing seems to be what Python was invented for: it was the control language for the Amoeba distributed OS, as described by Guido van Rossum himself:
      Guido van Rossum: In 1986 I moved to a different project at CWI, the Amoeba project. Amoeba was a distributed operating system. By the late 1980s we found we needed a scripting language. I had a large degree of freedom on that project to start my own mini project within the scope of what we were doing.
      I don't know if you knew about this stuff in advance, but working on distributed code was apparently a great way to play into Python's strengths-by-design. Amoeba has long been one of those neat little esoteric systems that I've wanted to play with (also including Plan9/Inferno), but have never had the chance to. I wonder if it ever got any traction outside of research circles...
      --
      DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
    2. Re:heh... funny you should mention this.... by costas · · Score: 2, Funny

      Sounds very interesting... are you by any chance using IPython as the shell? if not, it might worth a look, it basically makes the Python CLI a super-shell, so it sounds like you could insert your distributed code under the IPython layer and get a distributed super-shell :-)

  2. Tivoli! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    If you got a few million to spare, Tivoli does anything!