Distkeys distributes a list of SSH public keys to a list of servers. It reaches servers behind a firewall as well.

Furthermore it executes a command or a script on a list of servers.

Distkeys is a ruby script which requires:

• Ruby ;)
• Net::SSH v2, debian package ruby-net-ssh (Squeeze and older: libnet-ssh2-ruby)
• Net::SSH::Gateway, debian package ruby-net-ssh-gateway (Squeeze and older: libnet-ssh-gateway-ruby)
• Net::SFTP v2, debian package ruby-net-sftp (Squeeze and older: libnet-sftp2-ruby)
• Termios, debian package ruby-termios (Squeeze and older: libtermios-ruby)
• SCP

Distkeys can also use SFTP, when you remove the occurences of ":via => :scp". This is not configurable via option yet.

Read more in our blog (in german):

Distkeys als Open Source

Distkeys is hosted at:

https://www.teamix.org/projects/distkeys

https://github.com/teamix/distkeys

The git repository is prepared to handle debian package builds via git-buildpackage. It has the following branches:

• master: This is were changes to the Debian packages go.
• upstream: This is were upstream changes go.
• pristine-tar: This would be for release tarballs if any.

Using the -F command line option, you may specify an alternative per-user SSH configuration file which will be used instead of the default ~/.ssh/config (see ssh(1)'s -F command line option for details).

For example, given the following ~/.ssh/distkeys.config:

Host *
	ForwardAgent yes
	Compression yes
	StrictHostKeyChecking no
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/tmx_rsa

Then, distkeys -F ~/.ssh/distkeys.config -h <hostlist> <action> will cause Distkeys to enable agent forwarding and compression, disable strict host key checking and using ~/.ssh/tmx_rsa as SSH identity file.

See the ssh_config(5) manpage for details about available configuration options.

There is an error in Net::SFTP v2 prior to 2.0.5 which needs to be added manually:

If you get:

/usr/[...]/lib/net/sftp/session.rb:123:in `download!': uninitialized constant Net::SFTP::Session::StringIO (NameError) 

add

require 'stringio'

to the top of the session.rb file mentioned in the exception message.

For further information about this error, see:

ruby net-sftp uninitialized constant