Using csshX to Manage Multiple Virtual Machines

I was looking for a cluster ssh tool to use to run updates and installs on multiple Virtual Machine servers. I had been having to ssh into each server individually, but with four servers this is already monotonous enough.

Searching the web I found Cluster SSH which looked cool, but I could not afford to use the X11 visual forwarding. The next tool that came up was a tmux script that would use tmux to synchronize tiles. Unfortunately tmux is not the easiest to learn, so I continued my search.

Then I came across csshX which is cluster ssh for OSX. This tool was very easy to use, first I created a file /etc/clusters. With this structure:

clustername user@0.0.0.0 user@8.8.8.8
custername2 user2@8.0.8.0 user2@1.2.3.4

Once I had my /etc/clusters set up I could call the command by entering csshX clustername. When you run this command you can control multiple shells easily.

Check out csshX for simple management of servers using OSX