Microsoft Operations Manager, Systems Management Server comparable for Linux

[Tom Brown]

> There's a F/OSS app that uses SSH to execute the same command on
> multiple machines, saving the admin the pain of doing the same thing on
> each machine manually.

if you have ssh root keys setup then you could just do something like

#!/bin/bash
HOSTNAMES=`cat update-list.txt`

for i in $HOSTNAMES
   do
         ssh $i '/etc/init.d/ntpd stop && ntpdate ntp && 
/etc/init.d/ntpd start'
   done

to run that task on many boxes quickly - you can do this for just about 
anything