Does anyone know of a graphical tool or some tools for remotely managing a number of Linux systems? I've checked out Webmin and it's very nicely done, but it doesn't do quite what I want. You can apply some configuration functions to multiple systems, but only one at a time. There is not functionality to, for example, add a particular user to five different machines at once, or manage Apache config simultaneously across several machines.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise at our shop and our system administrators are hating it because they come from a Windows and Novell background and are not accustomed to doing everything on the command line. There are the Red Hat graphical administration tools of course but they are of very uneven quality. Some are OK, some are virtually unusable. Also, those tools all only work on the system they're installed on. They don't work on a whole bunch of machines at once.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Seems to me you are looking for dsh, which allows you so send a command over ssh to multiple hosts at the same time.

Don't know if this if what you have in mind.

I used www.google.com/linux, and entered the keywords 'remote management software', which returned 178,000 hits.

I didn't address the lack of GUI interfaces, but you can probably get the interfaces if you ssh -X so the X is forwarded to you so you get the grafical configuration interfaces, but if these are servers they shouldn't actually have them.

Other options are rsyncing the relavant config files with a cron job or some other form of replication. Using a centralized user managment system like ldap. Using a centralized directory service like NIS(careful on the security, it is not encrypted).

You can translate to them that ldap+NIS gives something like active directory.

If you use dsh the best option is to use public key authentication so you don't have to type the password for the command and can make some nice scripts.

Thanks for the replies so far. That's very helpful. I had not know about dsh before.