a project idea... help needed!

[Phil Meyer]

On 05/23/2011 03:08 PM, Matthew Byrd wrote:
> Hey guys... I've got a project idea I proposed to Red Hat directly and
> Brendan Conoboy told me that they don't deal with this sort of thing..
> what I need is a nice little program I'm willing to pay for or give to
> open source or both.
>
> The basics.. you have an icon in the notification area of gnome or in
> the system menu.. click on the icon then you have a list of your hosts
> or groups or whatever, once you click on any one of the hosts or
> groups, you're prompted to choose the action you want to perform on
> the host or group. All the actions are simple templates with
> parameters so they're all open and modifiable. You can add more hosts
> or remove hosts, etc.
>
> I need something like this bad because my shell scripts are now in the
> hundreds and I'd rather be able to quickly do things to groups with my
> desktop.
>
> Now i just need to figure out if i have to pay someone to make it or
> if i can find somewhere that interest in the project will get it off
> the ground.
>
> I did a little mock-up and put it up here.
> http://www.byrdits.com/files/ap.svg
>


There are three styles of this concept, and many implementations.

Style 1: Push -- this is the style you described.

Style 2: Interactive:  This involves typing into one window and having 
it typed into many.

Style 3:  Batch update:  In this mode, the clients periodically check a 
central service to see if any action is required.

All three of these styles have several methods, and several 
implementations of each.

There are whole categories of applications dedicated to this, such as 
software distribution and updates, remote monitoring, and remote 
management/help desk.

The best of the interactive style no longer exists.  It was made by SUN, 
and did not survive the transition to Solaris 8 and above.  However, on 
Linux we have konsole, which although not as robust, works well.  Using 
konsole, we can open sessions to many hosts in one tab per host, type 
into one konsole tab, and have that repeated into all tabs.

The biggest missing feature of konsole, is the ability to automatically 
open a number of tabs into different systems easily.

Here is a snippet of how I do it using xdotool and konsole:

#!/bin/sh

hosts="172.20.32.12 172.20.32.15 172.20.32.16 172.20.32.17 172.20.32.18 
172.20.32.9 172.20.32.20 172.20.32.25 172.20.32.22 172.20.32.23"


for mynum in $hosts
     do
     xdotool key "ctrl+shift+t"
     xdotool type "ssh $mynum
"

done

Kind of a kludge, but effective.  The old SUN product did more like you 
suggested.  You could specify on the command line any number of hosts, 
and it would log into all of them at once (permitting your system limits 
would allow that many active connections/windows).  Those commands could 
easily be made into an icon action.  I miss it.

I have worked on a project in style 3 using cron and windows scheduler, 
vnc, and perl, with a web based front end.  It works.  With that product 
I can go to the web page, see the list of clients, and enter or select 
something I wish to happen on those systems, and next time they check 
in, they perform that action.  It might be as simple as open an ssh 
tunnel to me and start a vnc server on a specific port.  When that 
happens I can connect to that host and help a user, diagnose a problem, 
or run some maintenance.  Kinda cool.

Good Luck!