Sometimes, specially in small computational groups, it is usual that the people uses the workstations for running calculations, and in case of a “trusted” network, were all the colleagues can log-in to each other’s computers, it is sometimes also the case, that everybody calculates everywhere. But at the moment of submitting a calculation, if your own PC is already busy, how do I find a computer in my network, which is not running anything at the moment?

You could ssh to each host and run <it>top</it> or something like that, but that is really slow when you have a lot of computers, and you have vs. to repeat the task very often.

The solution: “checkpc”
checkpc is a python script which can scan a whole network of computers and return the load of all PCs within it in less than 3 seconds. Continue reading →