July 29, 2002

HostMonster is a treeview based host session manager for Linux/Unix. Basically, this means you can use a GUI to manage your list of hosts you frequently connect to using Telnet (bad) or SSH (good). I know many admins who prefer to use X that could use something like this. Currently, there is nothing comparable for the X-Windows environment. I wrote it over a weekend because a friend needed it and I figured it would be fun to write (it was!). It demonstrates some cool stuff you can do with Bash.

Once you have entered a new host, it writes the file to $HOME/.hostmonster and makes it executable. So, it is essentially a launcher. As such, you can drop just about any executable or link to an executable into $HOME/.hostmonster/GroupName and it will show up in the GUI and can be executed. Games, VNC hosts, etc... the only thing is, there isn't a GUI for adding those kinds of things. I might add something like that later but for now it's just a simple host manager. Xdialog wasn't meant for full-blown GUI projects. I will have to cave and learn GTK+ or QT for that ;-)

This program has only one requirement: Xdialog. I have an RPM of Xdialog I scrounged off of FreshMeat, if you would prefer that format. There are .debs out there.

License: This software is licensed under GNU Public License (GPL).

Here is the download. Shift-click to download. Place this shell script somewhere in your path (usually /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin) and make sure it's executable (chmod +x hostmonster). You don't necessarily need root priveleges to run this program. But you will need root privs to install Xdialog.

Screenshots

Here is the main window. It shows existing host sessions as well as an option for adding a new session.

If you click on 'Add New Host' then you will be prompted to choose an existing group or you may add a new one.

If you choose, 'Add New Group', then you will see this window

Once you enter a group name you will be asked for session info.

Finally, you'll be asked for optional information like colors and ports