Also, are there any tools for mass remote administration? SSH is nice and all, but it would be awesome if one could tell 30 machines to shutdown -h now simultaneously.
Run a cron job on the workstations to run a script stored on the server
if it exists would be simple but effective.
Not really, innit? I mean, aside from security issues, I can't tell them to do something on demand - I have to wait till the 30 or so machines parse the file every so often (which you probably don't want them doing every 30 seconds). What if I only want to shutdown/update 5 machines? Maybe I want to kill a specific application on this users machine.
It's an extra level of abstraction and unnecessary complication, I'd say.
To give you an example of what I was aiming at, take Apple Remote Desktop. It essentially works like a mass vnc observer; we can give the computers simple commands, take them over and install stuff on them or push files over the network. Sometimes we catch kids (this is a school place I'm talking about afterall) trying to run games or monkeying around - you log into ARD and just take over his computer.
Just sayin'.
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