Managing SSH and other remote connections with PAC

Rest in PAC

Article from ADMIN 04/2011

By Tim Schürmann

With its intelligent functionality, PAC can bring order to active SSH connections.

When hard-working administrator David Torrejón Vaquerizas got fed up with manually juggling zillions of connections to the servers he managed, he turned to Perl to program a small graphical user interface for SSH, Telnet, an so on.

Over time, Vaquerizas kept adding interesting and useful functions to the Perl Auto Connector, or PAC for short [1]. Now, PAC automates the process of running commands at the command line both on local and remote machines. In doing so, it takes care of SSH certificates autonomously, can use a proxy server to contact remote machines, and can wake up sleeping machines via Wake-on-LAN [2].

Additionally, you can add multiple connections to a cluster. In this case, all of the connected machines will run any commands you type in parallel.

Starter's Gun

Because this jack-of-all-trades is licensed under the GNU GPLv3, you can use it free of charge. The only precondition is a fairly recent Linux distribution with Gnome. Although PAC runs on other desktops, you would have to do without some minor features, such as the useful panel applet for rapid access.

The installation is easily completed: You just need to make sure you have Perl installed on your own machine. Then, you can pick up the libgnome2-vte-perl package that matches your distribution from the project homepage at SourceForge [3]. After installing the libraries, go back to SourceForge to pick up the PAC Manager package proper in the pac-2.0 subdirectory.

Depending on your distribution, you can load a .deb, .rpm, or .tar.gz package, and install. Just unzip the .tar.gz archive. To launch PAC Manager, click the corresponding entry in the start menu (Internet

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