Motivation

Assume that you are managing a pretty large infrastructure of hosts, sometimes there is a need to execute a command on all of them.

The big question is, where to find out, which hosts exist.

Solution

The usual approach is to invent some kind of centralised daemon that collects or searches for available hosts. There is a way simpler solution available in my situation, which may help you as well: We do have a monitoring infrastructure, to which all hosts transmit their configuration. The configuration is stored containing the full hostname (like foo.bar.local.ch) plus the .cfg suffix.

Thus a script that can be used to execute something on all hosts (sequentially though) can look like this:

for host in $(ssh monitoring01 "cd /opt/icinga/etc/hosts.d; ls"); do
    host=${host%.cfg}
    ssh "root@$host" "$@"
done