© Stanislav Rishnyak, 123RF.com
Managing computers with Rex
King of Computers
Rex gives administrators the ability to manage all the machines on a network from a central location. The only precondition is that all of the computers must be reachable via SSH, and the admin computer also needs to have a Perl environment installed. On your own computer, you can then define a task that selected computers, or all of them, will run.
In this way, you can retroactively install and delete programs, handle maintenance, change the configuration of all your workstations uniformly, distribute documents, or simply query health state information for your systems.
With a correspondingly formulated task, you can simply issue, for example, the rex apache2 command to install apache2 on all your web servers and kit them out with the appropriate configuration files at the same time.
By the way, if you ask the programmer, Rex [1] should actually be called (R)?ex. But, because this is difficult to read, write, and pronounce, I will simply use Rex in this article.
Freedom of Choice
Rex can manage computers running the Linux distributions CentOS 5 and 6, Debian 5 and 6, Fedora, Gentoo, Mageia, openSUSE, RHEL 5 and 6, Scientific Linux, and Ubuntu 10.04, 11.04, and 12.04. Additionally, it can handle Solaris (SunOS) and BSD systems. Although Rex does not actively block other Linux distributions, you should keep your fingers crossed when you activate a task.
Rex itself is only needed on the administrator's own machine, which even can be a Windows or Mac OS X machine; the only important thing is that you have a Perl environment in place. To install Rex, first pick up the git versioning tool (using the package manager on Linux) and add the make tool. Then, access GitHub and create the Makefile you will need for the installation:
git clone...
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Rex
Just as subjects must obey their king, all the computers and servers in an organization should follow the administrator’s commands. With Rex, you don’t even need to leave your admin throne.
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