Hi all,
I am an admin of a multinode network. It's annoying everytime I do the configuation over the whole network. I have to create/delete an identical user and do some configuation for that user in each computers on the network. For that purpose, I have written a program with 'expect' and shell script. It works sometime!!! But sometimes the configuration does fail! Actually, the expect is not as good as what I think. It takes lots of text information from the program's output as a key to proceed working. So, the user must be aware of everything of the output in order to keep the program working with problem. It sucks. I wonder if there is other way for my this job.

Actually, what I am handling is:

1) to create/delete/modify a user over the whole network(all the user and it's profile must be identical)

2) create/delete a directory over the whole network(all the path and name of the directy are identical)

3) modify the attribute of some directory over the whole network

4) install a software over the whole network (the software will be installed once in each computer)

5) copy files from one computer to all the other at the same directory

6) collect files from all the other computers to one

7) run a program in each computer at the same time.


BTW, for some reason, I don't want to use NFS for this task.

Thanks in advance.

1. You should use NIS for the user creation/deletion, it works with almost every suthentication method and it's quiet usefull for large networks.

2. This might be a security risk, but you can have a script that automatically logs in a remote computer and performs the changes that you want.

3. You can a set a single 'example' system and then have all the other computers rsync with a cron job.

4. To run a program in each computer at the same time you might want to use a cron job, or at (if it must run only once). However, if you need high level of coordination, perhaps you need QNX, an IBM mainframe or an Alphaserver Real aplication cluster.