Archive for July 20th, 2009

Script day – Shutting down multiple servers at once

A system administrator in my company recently approached me with a problem – how to shutdown multiple Linux servers at the same time from a central location. Apparently this is something that people in the MS-Windows world use all kinds of applications, like the Remote Shutdown Tool from Microsoft (though I don’t understand how they handle the authentication – this tools doesn’t seem to require any authentication so it appears that any person with network access can shutdown any computer).

Anyway, apparently searching the web for “Linux remote shutdown” yields no useful results (or so I’ve been told), but frankly – when you have standard UN*X tools at your fingertips, a remote shutdown tool is simply typing ssh root@server shutdown -r now at your local console. But still, for people who want a “tool” – read on.

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