Thursday, September 11, 2008

PuttyCS...You rock

Have you ever wished that there was a way to open many putty sessions, and be able to send the same command to all of the putty sessions at once? I have, and looks like I am not the only one.

PuttyCS is a tool that you can use to send the same command to many different telnet / ssh clients. This little tool has come in handy many times recently.

I had a situation where I had to simulate 200 instances of a command line application running on a server, in order to determine the performance of the application and the load that it would put on the server. Using this tool, I was able to open 200 putty sessions, start the application, and exercise it.

Another situation that I have is ongoing. Working within a cluster environment provides many benefits, but also, it can be a headache. In my circumstance, I have to tail the logs on each node from time to time. Using this tool, it becomes very easy to connect to different servers, and tail the logs on each node.

Once again, I highly recommend this tool, it is sure to save a lot of time and effort.

4 comments:

Jon Schneider said...

Sounds like this tool could come in handy! I've bookmarked it for future reference. Thanks, Carlus!

Anonymous said...

Dude, Splunk. Tail is so 2007.fox

Carlus Henry said...

Splunk is a great tool if you can afford it. Of course with that being said, admittingly, I should spend more time learning how to use it.

Belteshazzar Mouse said...

This really rocks! I just downloaded it to restart the application servers in our 6 node cluster. I logged in with the password button on all servers, then created two filters, half of the servers in one filter, half in the other. I stopped half the servers and tailed their logs (using wildcards to choose the correct log on each server). I removed the cache directory on each server and restarted, tailing the log on each.

I used the command history to do the same on the other half of the servers. This task cost me an hour and some confusing window management in production last week. PuTTYCS just saved me many hours of Monkey-pushes-button tasks! I am very grateful for this tip.