Greetings Brothers,

I must be candid and admit I'm not sure if I'm phrasing my question well, or if it even makes any sense at all.

Basically I'm looking for a way to safely make changes on remote servers.

For example, if I wanted to safely automate changing a user's password on my local machine, my first instinct is to search cpan for a perl module to use, such as Unix::PasswdFile, because I know that coders who are more experienced and skilled than I have "worked all the kinks out", and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

However, I need to do this sort of thing remotely on multiple machines now. I've about decided that Net::OpenSSH appears to be the most stable and predictable way of interacting with my remote servers, but unfortunately, installing Unix::PasswdFile on the remote machine and executing a script I upload is not really tenable (and involves the same issues in any case--cpan is not always foolproof :-) ).

I guess what I'm wondering is if there is a generalized system for treating the remote machine as if it was local? Or a technique for handling the situation when complex, interactive behaviors are required? In the password example I've given, I'd really rather avoid reading/writing to pipes while executing /usr/bin/passwd on the remote machine, as a blocking issue could make the machine inaccessible, for example. Does that make any sense?

In reply to Using local perl modules on remote SSH by rastoboy

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