Introducing the Personal *nix Cluster Manager
I was at home this holiday, with the family enjoying the Thanksgiving Holiday. I was messing around with stuff on my netbook and realized I wanted files from my desktop back in my apartment. Only problem was -- I have no idea what my IP is back there (I moved recently). I'm also too lazy to set up my own or pay for a proper dyndns solution. Why is it that in 2010 I still have this kind of problem? Shouldn't there be some application I can run on all my client PCs which keep them meshed together?
A bit of digging, couldn't find anything. So I wrote one. Introducing the 'Personal Cluster Manager for *nix/ssh systems'.
First, an important assumption: This software is meant to be used by you and you only. It probably won't scale to 1000 machines and I'm perfectly fine with that. I have a handful (10?) machines I care about keeping track of for my stuff and I imagine most of the people who are interested in this are on the same order of magnitude.
Ok, enough nonsense, what is it? There are three pieces:
A client daemon that maintains a reverse ssh tunnel with a master, always connected and accessible node. There's a good bit of configuration to get this right, so there's also a little helper script to ask the user questions to get the right config values for the client.
A "master" script. This provides an interface to a SQLite database which keeps track of what hosts we've seen, what ports their tunnels are on, etc. You can ask the master "show me all hosts you know about" or "which tunnels are active and usable right now?".
A curses-based UI. The UI pulls all its data from the master program, and doesn't do any direct querying. (This is intentional, as I intend to build other kinds of UIs and want all the data stuff to be handled underneath the UI). The UI shows you what tunnels are active to which hosts, and with one keypress can give you a shell on any of the remote machines (using the reverse tunnel set up by the client).
All 3 of the above are working in version 0.1 on GitHub.
A very poor quality screencast with typos and minor bugs left and right, but you'll get the idea: (never mind the 'scrollz' stuff, that's something particular about my local bashrc and nothing to do with PCM)