Since I made the switch to a Mac in my day job, I’ve had two major frustrations. The first is the lack of Visio for OS X. The second one, was a little more major. I needed a replacement for MRemoteNG. I’ve searched for options and grown weary of reading the general post of “why would you need a specialized SSH tool, when it is built into the terminal of OS X?”

That statement is usually offered by a web developer who might have SSH connections to 3-5 servers on a daily basis. They live in a very specific world, and have a hard time understanding anything outside of that world. Feel bad for them; don’t hate them.

In the world of network engineers however, we may connect to 50 or more devices in a day, and may have logins to thousands of devices over an enterprise network. In that environment, there is a real need for the ability to bookmark devices.

After searching for options, I found one option that worked to some extent. This SSH workflow for Alfred is excellent. However, since I use a hosts file from someonewhocares.org to block a lot of advertisers and trackers, the index was never very useful.

After considering this problem from all angles, I finally had an “AH HA!” moment, and the simplicity of the solution made me equal parts giddy and disappointed that it took me so long to resolve. I created a file with a similar layout to a hosts file, in-fact I even named it hosts.txt. Each row of the file list a hostname, and an IP address. Since this file is purely text, you could add anything to each line that you wanted. 

#site1
device1 10.0.1.1 description
device2 10.0.1.2 unique protocol info
device3 10.0.1.3 more information
device4 10.0.1.4
#site2
device1 10.0.2.1
device2 10.0.2.2
device3 10.0.2.3
device4 10.0.2.4
device5 10.0.2.5
#site3
device1 10.0.3.1
#site4
device1 10.0.4.1
device2 10.0.4.2

But how does this help us manage thousands of devices you ask? It doesn’t, but grep does. If we pass a search string to grep along with the file name, all matching hosts show up. Yes it is simple, but it is useful because of that!

In my file, I created a site heading by starting the line with an octothorpe. I use this so that I can search for sites. This looks like:

grep ^# hosts.txt
#site1
#site2
#site3
#site4

I can also search for all devices at a location using a statement like:

grep ^#site2 -A6 hosts.txt
#site2
device1 10.0.2.1
device2 10.0.2.2
device3 10.0.2.3
device4 10.0.2.4
device5 10.0.2.5
#site3

In this case, I am telling it to start at “#site2” and show the next 6 lines. Since the 6th line is the next site, I know that I am seeing all of the devices from site 2.

Finally, if I know part of the hostname, I can simply search on it, and it will display.

Hopefully this gives you a better way of managing huge networks from terminal.