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In the Windows world, tools like Group Policy, System Center Configuration Manager, and DesktopAuthority, among others, have been around for 8 or more years to allow fast simple deployment of software and updates to remote computers, or force tasks to be run on remote computers.

For the Unix/Linux world, there doesn’t seem to be as much available.

If you have a pure HP-UX shop, there is HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) with plug-ins available for software deployment, and I believe IBM Tivoli has a function or sub-product which does the same thing if you have all AIX systems. Red Hat Network has a feature to allow commands to be run on your servers, but only whenever they check in with the RHN or your internal Satellite Server (much like Group Policy, except GPO doesn’t allow “in the middle of the day” script creation without GP-Preferences). So what’s available that’s like SCCM or DesktopAuthority - a “click now and do this thing” tool?

A bunch of my customers just have various levels of logging and processing that come down to being a big for loop that ssh’s into a server and runs a command:
for i in `cat server-list.txt` ; do scp scriptname $i:/root/; ssh $i "/root/scriptname" | tee logfile-$i.log; done;
While it works great for smaller commands. if you have a mixed environment, the “scriptname” script has to be intelligent enough to know what it’s running against, or your “server-list.txt” has to be broken up by class of system. In either case, if you have 200 systems in the list, and the task takes 5 minutes per server, a single install will run for 16-17 hours.

Software like Likewise Enterprise which allow Group Policy management to remote computers is great, because you can have guaranteed delivery and execution of your script or command in (by default) 30 minutes, but my problem is how to get it there in the first place?

So, administrators out there in companies with 1000, 4000, 10000+ servers (or even Desktops), what mutli-threaded or multi-process tool are you using to tackle this timing/resouce problem? Please post below!