Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Sun Cluster Console - How it simplifies life even if you don't use Sun Cluster


Recently I am working with about 6 Sun Fire V440 connected to many 3510s and one of the pains is doing repetitive steps on all the 6 servers.


Enter Sun Cluster Console (part of Sun Java Enterprise System).


Basically what you need is SUNWcconsol package which after installation is available at /opt/SUNWcluster.


You have to try out /opt/SUNWcluster/bin/ctelnet.


After making sure I had the right display permissions/settings, I did


$ ctelnet v440-1 v440-2 v440-3 v440-4 v440-5 v440-6 &



It pops up 6 terminal screens and a small window containing a text box and few menu options . When I type in the small box it gets typed in all the 6 terminals. This way I can log into all the servers at the same time and do repetitive steps on all of them simultaneously saving me tremendous amount of time.


You can use the menu options to temporarily not type into any specific host and reset it back to normal later on. A tremendous time saver when you have to setup multiple boxes say for GRID or CLUSTER or HPC or DB2 DPF.


crlogin and cconsole are also available.


3 comments:

Mike Marschall said...

This type of thing can also be accomplished with SSH and public/private keys. Using the same setup files can be pushed to all hosts via scp.

Justin Shaffer said...

Mike,
While you can scp files to multiple machines, im not aware of a ctelnet like solution that uses ssh? I was just going to comment - does anybody still actually use telnet? a solution that uses ssh - or was a bit more pluggable regarding connections (nc tunnelled shells, etc) would be neat.
-Justin

Eric Grancher said...

good afternoon,
I fully agree that telnet has gone, ssh should be the default imho. Anyway I use for a long time the SUNWcconsol package, you just have to ssh to the hosts that you want to want to connect and it is really useful (I am actually surprised that there is no other product that does this as part of the OS core utilities).
see you,
eric