On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Kevin Lombardo wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 1:11 AM, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote:
>> On Thu, 27 Nov 2008, Kevin Lombardo wrote:
>>
>>> On my Windows box, I have a program called Putty Command Sender, which 
>>> will execute a command on all existing Putty instances, or a subset of 
>>> them based on a filter.
>>>
>>> Is there a good way to do this in Gnome? Whether with gnome-terminal 
>>> or another term program?
>>
>>
>> Would you mind telling us what you use it for?  I'm curious.  Also, if 
>> I knew what you were doing, I might come up with an idea.
>
>
> I have 10 servers which I deploy applications on. I just copy the file 
> to the server, validate the md5sum, rm the old application, and untar 
> the new one.

OK.  Here's something I haven't used myself, but I think it is the sort of 
thing you'll be wanting to do.  You can set up ssh so that you can log in 
securely without a password.  Read about "ssh-keygen" and related 
programs.  There are man pages and there should be plenty of step-by-step 
guides on the web (maybe someone else on this list will know which are 
best).  You can then use scripts to run commands on the remote systems:

ssh system1 "command args filenames"
ssh system2 "command args filenames"
ssh system3 "command args filenames"

I think you will discover that this makes your life a lot easier than use 
of PuTTY on Windows.  You can even do this kind of stuff with 
stdin/stdout:

cat file.tgz | ssh system "rm oldfiles ; cat - > file.tgz ; md5sum file.tgz ; tar zxf file.tgz ; whatever"

The stdout from md5sum goes to you on the local machine.  I have tested 
this and it works.  I had to enter my password though, but you can set it 
up with keygen and avoid that step.

Using a bash script, you can make it so that you maintain a list of system 
names in a file, then tell bash that for every system in the file it 
should do the following...

Mike