Managing multiple Ubuntu servers painlessly

Like most programmers, I don’t like to repeat manual tasks, well, manually. We use Ubuntu Server almost exclusively on our servers and whilst package management is very simple (login, aptitude update, aptitude dist-upgrade, all done) when you have to look after many (fourteen and expanding) servers it can get repetitive.

I use Terminal (or is it called Terminal.app?) on Mac OS X as my terminal emulator, and I’ve messed around with using Applescript to open multiple tabs before, so I figured this was a problem worthy of a Sunday-morning.

What I envisaged was iterating over a list of servers and having Applescript manage a Terminal instance, opening new tabs where appropriate, and executing the upgrade command in each tab for each server. Sounds simple enough.

And it was. I used Martin Ström’s excellent article as a base for my script, and ended up with the following:

set tab_count to 0
set servers to {"astrotrain", "bumblebee", "grimlock", "ironhide", ¬
	"jazz", "laserbeak", "mirage", "prime", ¬
	"prowl", "ratchet", "ravage", "rumble", ¬
	"soundwave", "wheeljack"}
-- Update the package list, dist-upgrade and remove the downloaded
-- packages so they're not included in the backups
set dist_upgrade to ¬
	" 'sudo aptitude update &&
	  sudo aptitude dist-upgrade &&
	  sudo aptitude clean'"

-- Make our settings globally available
global tab_count, servers, dist_upgrade

-- Mainline
on main()
	tell application "Terminal"
		activate
		repeat with server in servers
			set cmd to "ssh -t " & server & dist_upgrade & " && exit"
			my open_tab(cmd)
		end repeat
	end tell
end main

on open_tab(cmd)
	tell application "Terminal" to activate
	my create_new_window_or_tab()
	tell application "Terminal" to ¬
		do script with command (cmd) in last tab of window 1
end open_tab

on create_new_window_or_tab()
	if tab_count ≤ 0 then
		tell application "Terminal" to do script ""
		set tab_count to tab_count + 1
	else
		tell application "System Events" to ¬
			tell process "Terminal" to ¬
				keystroke "t" using command down
	end if
end create_new_window_or_tab

-- Run the mainline
main()

Apologies for the highlighting – the plugin doesn’t understand Applescript.