Terminal Software Switch

[Andrew Shewmaker]

Hello,

I use a utility called pconsole.  Freshmeat describes it in this way:

"pconsole is a parallel console tool, and is meant as an interactive 
administrative shell tool for clusters. It allows you to connect to each 
node of your cluster simultaneously, and you can type your 
administrative commands in a specialized window that 'multiplies' the 
input to each of the connections you have opened."

The command "pconsole.sh node1 node2 node3" would open four xterms, one
for each node and another that can will redirect what you type to all
of them at once.  Each xterm works like a regular xterm also.  The
default setting is to use a tiny font, but that can be changed by
control right-clicking on the window or editing the script.

Most window managers have a window list tool that makes it pretty easy 
to select the xterm you want (they have names like user at node: dir). 
This doesn't address the ability to raise a specific xterm from the 
command line, but KDE (that is what I am using) may allow you to script 
that through dcop.

I have not noticed any scalability problems, but I usually only have 43 
xterms running off a dual 1.2GHz Athlon with 2GB RAM.  At most I have
used two instances of pconsole, each with 43 xterms.

Unfortunately the web site seems to be down right now.  Mandrake 
includes it in their distribution though, or I could send you the
15k rpm.

pconsole is GPLed, but I have never seen the source (pconsole.sh is a
frontend to pconsole).  Also, by default pconsole uses ssh and can only 
be run by root.  This can be changed.

I hope this helps,

Andrew

Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Rick <wulf at righi.df.unibo.it> wrote:
>>
>>>Hello, I got a Linux Pc farm of 80 PCs.
>>>Using the hardware switch is really uncomfortable so I decided to search
>>>for a proper software but I cannot find it anywhere.
>>>I need a software which can allow me to open multiple windows on one
>>>terminal like the screen GNU software does but I am not interested in
>>>having a shell spawned. I am interested that every new window opened on my
>>>console terminal spawns a ssh or telnet process to one machine of my Linux
>>>cluster and i want t oswitch between one connactoin to another.
>>>Does a software like this exist already in the Beowulf software ??
>>>I Tryed to search for something like this but I did not find anything.
>>>Could someone give me some hint about if such a thing exists within the
>>>Beowulf project??
>>>thank you a lot.
>>>
>>I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for here; it's either
>>something really trivial or something extremely complex.
>>
>>One can invoke an e.g. xterm with a shell command.  That shell command
>>can be (e.g.) ssh b1 or ssh b2...  Alternatively, one can ssh b1 xterm,
>>ssh b2 xterm...
>>
>>One can contruct an icon or GUI to spawn the xterms (by name) a variety
>>of ways depending on your windowing system and pack them into a taskbar.
>>Doing this by hand would be very tedious, but if you learn to edit stuff
>>in e.g. .gnome/* by hand you can probably autogenerate a gnome-style
>>launcher.
>>
>>Just one of many ways to create a more portable and general solution is
>>to write a C application or perl-Gtk script with e.g.  glade with 80
>>buttons (1-80) which exec xterms when pressed.  If you go this route you
>>can choose to run the xterms locally (and execute ssh bX in the xterm)
>>or ssh bX xterm (remotely execute the xterm on the bX host). 
>>
> 
> Hi,
> 
>   I would like to take this a step further.
> 
>   Let's say I've started 20 xterms, each with an ssh session to a
> (different) host. Can I bring one of these xterms to the foreground
> by hostname?  
> 
>   E.g. I have xterm/ssh sessions to hosts: apple, banana, orange,
> and tomato. :)  I'd like to run an app that will make a small window
> pop up, I type "apple", (or "a", and have a name completion routine
> fill out the rest), hit Enter, and voila, the xterm with the ssh
> session to "apple" is brought from background or iconization to
> foreground.
> 
>   With 30 different xterms open, this would be VERY handy.
> 
>   Has anybody else run into this already/solved it?
> 
> Best regards,
> Aleksey.
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