automating commands on nodes

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Sun, 04 Jun 2000, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> hi jakob,
> 
> we have ssh on the beowulf frontend, but not on the nodes.  any ideas on
> automating installing ssh on the nodes?  i haven't seen redhat 6.1 ssh rpms,
> i guess that's a remnant of the USA's moronic crypto export policy (which i
> understand was mostly lifted).

I was wondering about the restrictions myself, as RH6.2 seems to ship with
Kerberos5...    Anyway, you can find RedHat-Crypto directories at your favourite
FTP site holding ssh-1.2.27-7i as src.rpm which works nicely with RH6.1 and 6.2
at least.

I was considering OpenSSH, now that it supports ssh-2 protocol. Never got
around to migrate to ssh-2 because of the lame license.  OpenSSH may well
be worth investigating if you're about to install SSH on a lot of machines
anyway.

No I don't know how to automate SSH installation on a lot of nodes where
you don't have remote access (except for telnet).  Maybe you could write
up an expect script to telnet into a node and run rpm -U /mnt/somewhere/ssh-...

Actually, even if you haven't got the faintest idea about how to write
an expect script, the autoexpect program should get you started.  I managed
to write an expect script for logging into a Cisco and pulling BGP tables
in some 5 minutes or so, without _ever_ having used expect before.  The
autogenerated script will need light editing, but that should be fairly
easily once you have the basic script written all for you.  Check out
autoexpect.

> 
> i've tried to use mandrake's ssh packages on a redhat 6.1, but redhat balked
> at the mandrake rpms.
> 
> btw, i didn't know ssh had the capability to run stuff non-interactively.
> that is a very cool thing to know!  thank you very much!

They provide the same features as rsh (but in a secure manner!), and then
some.   Really nice.

-- 
................................................................
: jakob at ostenfeld.dtu.dk  : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
:        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: