announcement: cluster tail released

I’m happy to announce the release of a new piece of software that I’ve written. Cluster Tail or ctail for short. Basically, it multiplexes lots of SSH connections, to invoke tail -f on a large set of machines or log files.

It isn’t the most amazing idea, but if you have ever had hundreds of machines (or even a dozen), trying to understand what is going on across all of can be very difficult, and this is just another tool to make that easier.

Most other methods of reading log files on large clusters get away from classic Unix Philosophy, but ctail can easily be piped into other commands.