Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all,
I've just joined. I did a google search and your site came up,
I had a look and thought I'd like to become a member.

I'm from Ireland.

I've written a few scripts before, but this new task has me foxed.

I would like to figure out the best approach to achieving the following

A single script that does the following
login to machine a (I typically use putty to do this)
login to machine b (as above)
on machine_a run a command such as "service xxx stop; service xxx start"
on machine_a ps -ef | grep AppName to confirm the app started right
on machine_a run top, and grep for a process by name, and batch the cpu% usage result to a file ( I can do this already)

on machine_b cd to a specific directory
on machine_b run a script that points at machine_a

on machine_b, when the script finishes
machine_a will parse the result file, and confirm the average of the cpu% is less than a threshold

That's pretty much it.
The hard part I suppose would be the single script spawing scripts on two different machines and synchonising them?

Thanks for your help in advance!
Bloke

The easiest approach from a scripting standpoint would be to use ssh to launch commands on the remote system. ssh user@host "command [options]"

Thanks for reply.

When I tried that
ssh root@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX "ls -al"

it asked me for a password.

As I would like to automate the process by scripting, without having to type in passwords.

Are there alternative approaches.

Set up public key authentication for your account on the server. That should enable password-less login

Setting up public key authentication looks quite complex, is there a less complex way?

I don't know how to do it.

Or an alternative way to issue commands to two boxes from one script!

Public key authentication is quite simple actually.