>When I get some service or updates done to my test Linux server, that's >actually the easy part. Then I have to move it around to more than a dozen >other Linux servers, logging on to each one in turn and doing an FTP "get"
rdist is a reasonable way to accomplish this. By default, it preserves the owner, group, mode and mtime of all files. The man page is quite useful. There's also an easy way to automate programs like ftp, telnet and others that are not interactively scriptable from the shell. A package called Expect (requires Tcl) has a utility called autoexpect which will record keystrokes to a file, which can then be played back as a cron job. Expect is fully scriptable with Tcl. In most cases, the autoexpect script will be good to go, as recorded; however, the most common cause of script failure is not program logic but rather timing. You may need to increase the time increments between submissions and responses. A complete Tcl installation should include Expect. http://expect.nist.gov for Expect http://dev.scriptics.com/ for Tcl
