Old-School UNIX Script: Cluster Command

As a UNIX systems administrator I had to maintain many individual workstations located throughout our facility, and I frequently had to either perform updates on all of the machines or some some subset of them. Logging in to each machine was tedious, even if I was just running a batch script, so I created a script that could send my commands out to all the computers that I listed in a configuration file. The configuration file was a simple text file with a workstation name on each line.

Each of the workstations mounted a common user home directory, so I create a shared home directory for root where all of the administration programs would be located (note that this was not root's actual home directory as that would be problematic if a workstation ever experienced problems accessing the NSF share). With the administrative batch files accessible to all the workstations I could use the script below to initiate the command on the cluster.