What tool will accomplish this task?
I am a sysadmin for a medium sized 'Internet' company. I manage 30+ systems primarily running Debian with a few BSD boxes too. And you also failed to ask any question at all. If you're talking about automating the configuration of those hosts - to make sure that all of them have password authentication disabled, all of them are running ntp, etc, etc, then you need to look at: * Chef * CFEngine * Puppet Or similar. You write "policies" (read "rules") describing the state you want your server to be in, and they do the necssary. Each of these has a master-host and all the managed-hosts talk to it, to arrange the execution of the policies. If you prefer to run things over SSH instead of having a deamon, then you can look at Ansible, Fabric, or similar. Finally there is my own tool Slaughter which is closer to the first set of tools, but written in Perl and without the need for a deamon. If you want more specific help please .. ask a specific question. I could just as well say "A cheap student" for your question.. Check out http://www.scriptrock.com/ Vim. Telnet?