Re: Bug#230720: ITP: clusterssh -- administer multiple ssh or rsh shells simultaneously

[tony mancill <tony@mancill.com>]

Hi Jesus,

I wasn't aware of pconsole until your email, but from what I can tell
after a precursory look, the primary differences are:

* clusterssh is written in Perl, and hence is arch "all."  Because it is
written in Perl, it may be easier for folks to modify and extend.

* clusterssh is invoked a little differently, and you don't have to to 
know the tty/pty of the device you're attaching to.  E.g., you can 
invoke it as follows:

	cssh node1 tony@node2 username@node3

This will open a couple of xterms and ssh into node1 and node2.  Then
you get a Tk window that you can use to control these two shells.  You
can use the Tk control window to open more sessions.  You can also
interact with each shell separately if need be to sync things up.

* Both seem to need to be SUID, but I don't think that clusterssh has 
the same exposure on multiuser systems because you can't specify a tty.

* clusterssh can only be used in conjuction with ssh and rsh (and I 
suppose telnet with some modification), whereas it looks like you can 
use pconsole with any sort of tty device, including a big serial port 
mux or the like.

* clusterssh requires X.

I appreciate you bringing pconsole to my attention.

Cheers,
tony

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 09:59:13AM +0100, Jesus Climent wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 09:28:50PM -0800, tony mancill wrote:
> > Package: wnpp
> > Severity: wishlist
> > 
> > * Package name    : clusterssh
> >   Version         : 1.49
> >   Upstream Author : Duncan Ferguson <duncan_ferguson@users.sourceforge.net>
> > * URL             : http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterssh/
> > * License         : GPL
> >   Description     : administer multiple ssh or rsh shells simultaneously
> > 
> >  ClusterSSH allows you to control multiple ssh sessions at the same time.
> >  It is a Perl-Tk app that launched xterms for each of the sessions, but
> >  also allows you to interact with the individual xterms if desired.
> 
> what are the differences and/or (dis)advantages compared to pconsole?
> 
> not that i want you to withdrawm your ITP, but just out of curiosity.