hi all,

I need to write one script to copy multiple imp files
like
/etc/passwd
/etc/group
/etc/shadow
/etc/printers.conf
from system A, System B and system C to system Z
and I need to execute this script on System Z.
like if system is equal A copy 1 2 3 files to system Z into /A-files
if system is equal B copy 4 5 6 files to system z into /B-files
I have set password less ssh from and to A,B,C to Z and vice versa.

Could you please guide me as how to go about this..?

Thanks in Advance.
Manali.

Not to side-track you but you are re-inventing the wheel here. If your goal is configuration management, that is to say, making sure that system A has a certain /etc/passwd file while system B has another one, look at puppet or chef.

You can accomplish this via your method, you would have to create an ssh key for root and make sure it gets added to all the systems so that password less ssh can work via a script. Once that is done you can write a simple if then statement that checks md5 hashes on the files and copies them if they don't match.

I would strongly recommend taking a look at puppet, I have used it for years and am a huge puppet person. I have made a business case for implementing it at each company I have worked for and they usually go for it. The documentation is excellent as well and it should be pretty easy to install, and if you are going to manage less than 10 systems you can use the enterprise version for free which provides a nice GUI frontend.

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet

Start here: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/ They even have pre-made vm images you can use to get started!

Kustom42 may be correct, but another possibility, looking at the direction of the copies ie from A, B, C all to named dirs on Z suggests a backup scenario.
Normally Puppet is sending updates out, not pulling stuff back like that.
If this is a backup scenario, given passwordless logins setup, you'd just write a shell script with a loop and put it in cron.

You'll want these
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference

In the long run you may want to setup a proper backup system; what would you do when one of those hosts dies, you'll need more than those few files?

Thanks chrism101 and Kustom42 for replies.
No we have our Backup happening through Netbackup daily. It is just to be more safer and easier side to get those important files back rather than calling tape and then doing restores.

can this following script be useful ?



Code:
case $(hostname -s) in
systemA)
scp -p /etc/passwd systemz:/usr/local/backup/A-Files/
scp -p /etc/group systemz:/usr/local/backup/A-Files/
;;
systemB)
scp -p /etc/passwd systemz:/usr/local/backup/B-Files/
scp -p /etc/group systemz:/usr/local/backup/B-Files/
;;
esac

thanks.

scp using keypair authentication would be an easy method of achieving this.

That code looks about right (but needs testing of course) if its a push scenario.
You could use a pull scenario from systemZ, so you'd only have one copy to maintain & more secure.

I'm still not convinced this is worth it though, unless you specifically expect ONLY those files to become corrupt.
Note that if you go down this road, you'll need the shadow file as well.


What specific problem do you hope to solve by doing this?