[peteretep]

Apologies for the off-topic nature of this, but:

Something that's been capturing my imagination recently is sshing into a machine, pushing an appropriate shell binary to /tmp, and then executing it. If you have an exotic preference for shell (or vim config, or whatever), we've presumably generally got sufficient bandwidth these days to do a virtually instant user-space install and execution, no?

[falcolas]

With a judicious copying of certain dotfiles and directories, this should be quite possible. Just put your shell in ${HOME}/bin, and set your ${HOME}/.ssh/authorized_keys to execute that shell on login, and you should be in good shape.

Just expect a few questions from the admins when you do this.

[Skunkleton]

I wouldn't copy binaries between arbitrary systems (specific systems is fine), but copying configs is pretty easy with SSH as-is:

  #!/bin/bash -x
  HOST=$1
  scp -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=30 ~/.vimrc $HOST:~/.vimrc
  ssh -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=30 $HOST

With the above, you will only create one SSH connection, and you will only authenticate once.

[tomjakubowski]

The team I work on had similar needs†, so we built a tool, atop the Python library fabric, to sync a project to (multiple) remote machines, build it, and execute it with configurable command line arguments.

http://github.com/Oblong/obi

†: the specific use-case was for development of multi-machine GUI applications that run in configurations like "display walls" or "immersion rooms". for every developer to have their own "display wall" or "immersion room" would cost lots of $$$, so many of the design decisions were based around the needs of a team of N developers that "shares" these systems.

[solidsnack9000]

Arx is intended to allow exactly this instant user-space install and execution: https://github.com/solidsnack/arx

[peteretep]

That's a great link, thanks