[Beowulf] looking for good distributed shell program

[Prentice Bisbal]

Beowulfers,

I'm looking for something that isn't exactly cluster-related, but this
is something that most cluster admins would be familiar with. I'm
looking for a good distributed shell, something similar to tentakel or
gsh. I figure all of you probably have recommendations/opinions on the
best ones.

I'm familiar with tentakel, but I find it lacking in a few areas, and
it's recently been abandoned by it's developer. The author of tentakel
recommends gsh, but gsh doesn't allow to create pre-defined groups of
hosts in a config file.

Here's my wish list:

1. Be able to maintain a central config file with different group
definitiosn with in it.

2. Run the commands in parallel and organize the output

3. Be able specify the user the command runs as on the command-line, so
 I don't have to become root just to run a single command as root.

4. Be able to subtract systems from a group or add additional ones on
the commandline. For example, if I have group "cluster", but node05 is
down, so I want to omit it and add desktop1 instead, I could do
something like.

<command> -g cluster-node05+desktop1

I used a program with these features about 10 years ago. I think it was
gsh or dsh, but the gsh and dsh I've found today, are different than
what I used 10 years ago.

any recommendations?


-- 
Prentice