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24.01 Mac in the Shell: Mass Remote Management with dshell

by Edward Marczak
Jan, 2008 Issue

Article Synopsis

A feature article this month covers methods to manage an army of Macs post-deployment. In other words, after they’ve been imaged and rolled out to the masses. The products and methods listed there are certainly applicable and appropriate for many situations. I’m going to describe yet another method that comes in handy in other situations. dsh, the distributed shell, can run a command over groups of machines that you specify. It performs this magic over ssh, so, you can affect machines over LAN or WAN links, near or far. Since OS X and other machines have ssh in their base distribution, you can command across platforms. This article explains how you, too, can send out commands to all or a group of your Macs – simultaneously – with a single press of the return key.

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