[Samba] parallel administration tool for PCs?

[David Mathog]

This is a bit off topic, but I'm looking for a convenient way to manage
N "identical" Windows PCs, using as much as possible 1 command to do the
same thing on all of them.  The capabilities I'm looking for, preferably
in a single tool are, given a designated master machine and N clones of
that master:

1.  Compare all (or to a specified depth) files below some directory on
the workstations, displaying differences.  For instance, compare the
directory tree below C:\Program Files.

2  After determining which subset of the differences from (1) need to be
pushed, designate those files and "put", whereupon all such files are
copied from the master to the N remote machines.

3. Select a .bat file in the synchronized directory tree, invoke "run",
whereupon it runs inside a DOS shell on all remote machines.  The output
from that run is saved and diffed, so that anything that went wrong on
one of the machines may be spotted.

4  Run a program on the master (using Windows GUI), and it runs
on all the other machines at once, applying the same key strokes and
mouse events to all of them at once.  For instance, do an install on the
master and everything happens the same way on the other N machines.
If something different happens along the way, the option to address that
machine specifically would be provided.  This one is sort of the holy
grail for Windows administration, I'm not entirely sure that the Windows
GUI even provides a place to hack in between the mouse and keyboard to
achieve this.

I already have a collection of tools for doing bits and pieces of this,
but nothing that covers all of these bases:

>From Samba there is smbclient, which if buried in a script can be used
for the file transfers, so long as port 445/tcp is open on each
workstation.  That isn't too bad a security hole since it can be
restricted through the firewall to only talk to one controlling machine.
It is relatively easy to make it talk to N machines by addressing them
sequentially within a script, although it also requires one more machine
running Linux to perform all the smbclient operations.  Tar can do
the directory traversals, but there seems not to be any way to generate
checksums on the remote machines, so for a directory comparision one
would have to move all the relevant data over the net back to the
central machine.  Not very efficient if N is large and the disk space
being traversed is also large.

UltraVNC lets me do any console operation remotely, but only one machine
at a time.  If there was some way to run UltraVNC in parallel it would
almost do what (4) requires, but currently all one can do is switch from 
display to display, and then repeat the same commands on each.

Disk cloning (ghost and the like).  Massive overkill when just a few
files need to be tweaked.  Plus on Windows if the partition being copied
includes C:\Windows (and it always does for me) the whole sysprep etc. 
dance must be carried out.

md5deep generates a tree'd md5sum report, which could be used for the
file comparisons in (1), but it just runs on one machine at a time.

Boot all machines under linux.  This lets me use ssh to run scripts,
and since NTFS can be mounted read/write these days, access to the
XP directories is possible from linux.  That makes the file
synchronization relatively straightforward, but at the cost of having
to run a completely different OS, and the loss of the ability to run
programs within Windows.

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech