Remote Script command logging question

UNIX AIX
1

I've noticed that when running a script that connects to a number of our servers (to essentially run batch commands) that the commands aren't logged in the user's .sh_history or .bash_history files. Is there a place where this is logged (assuming the script itself isn't doing the logging and I'm not tee'ing the output anywhere)?

I'm talking specifically about AIX, but I would assume this question applies to all the *nix flavors.

As a tag-along to this post, I often nohup these commands (like sendmail -bi) so the script can run through all the hosts quickly. What can I enter in the script to create one large nohup.out on the machine running the script that's reaching out to all the others?Right now I've got

for node in `cat /home/root/script/shortlist`
#for node in `cat /usr/local/bin/AIX_server_list`
do
echo $node
ssh $node lssrc -s sendmail
echo "***"
ssh $node cp /etc/aliases /etc/aliases.old
scp -p /etc/aliases $node:/etc/aliases
ssh $node nohup sendmail -bi &
ssh $node lssrc -s sendmail
ssh $node cat /home/root/nohup.out >> ~/script/sendmailbi_log.txt
echo "%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%"
done

but that failed miserably, I'm guessing that's because the nohup was given via an ssh and not in an interactive shell so nothing got logged?

2

In short, no. If you use ssh to connect, you can probably put something in the stored public key on the target (~/.ssh/authorized_keys)

Are you connecting as root or a general user?

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

3

See also useless use of backticks. If the list of hosts grows too large your code will malfunction, but this code never will:

while read node
do
...
done < hostlist

Note you may want to < /dev/null for ssh, so that it doesn't eat lines from stdin inside the loop.

4

Thanks for the input. I'm doing this all as root.

As for the second part of my post, I ended up putting most of the script in one file that's now being called by a much shorter script that will tee the output to a log file. Its not elegant, but it does what I need it to as far as the logging goes.
Thanks Corona, looks like I've got some more reading to do :slight_smile:

Much appreciated!