BB-Central

I've read a few threads in the archive about bb-central, but not everybody is having luck getting it to work. We currently use bb-central for over 100 hosts, this poses some difficulties. When a connection failes during one of the ssh sessions, the whole bb-central script hangs and everything turns purple. Another is the bb-central script can take longer that 5 minutes because it probes 1 host at a time, this causes timeouts and purple displays. This pushes to make a good working replacement for bb-central with the following ideas:

• small scripts so you can test serveral (say 5 or 10) hosts at a time
• possible timeouts so the following scripts won't wait on it.
• a bbcentral-hosts file from wich the scripts are generated (hostnames and commands per host)
• should stay working after a Hobbit upgrade, so prefferably no editting the startup files or other files.

Before I start on this I would like some ideas, comments and if possible some people who would like to help because I'm not such a good shell-script-kiddy.

Grtz, Arnoud Post The Netherlands