iTerm is great, but if you are working with a cluster of servers, it quickly becomes tedious to open an SSH session to each server and to configure splits so you can talk to all servers at once. Based upon the scripts here (but does not use splits) and here (but does not work with 7 servers which I needed in my case), I came up with the following AppleScript that works for me.
-- Launch iTerm and log into multiple servers using SSH
launch application "iTerm"
tell application "iTerm"
activate
-- Read serverlist from file path below
set Servers to paragraphs of (do shell script "/bin/cat $HOME/serverlist")
set num_hosts to count of Servers
set current_host to 1
repeat with nextLine in Servers
-- If line in file is not empty (blank line) do the rest
if length of nextLine is greater than 0 then
set server to "nextLine"
set term to (current terminal)
-- Open a new tab
tell term
if current_host ≥ num_hosts / 2 then
tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "]" using command down
tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using {command down, shift down}
else
tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "d" using command down
end if
delay 1
-- launch session "Default Session"
tell the current session
write text "ssh root@" & nextLine
-- sleep to prevent errors if we spawn too fast
do shell script "/bin/sleep 0.01"
end tell
end tell
end if
set current_host to current_host + 1
end repeat
-- Close the first tab since we do not need it
terminate the first session of the current terminal
end tellThe script will launch iTerm and open as many split panes as is needed.
The server ip addresses are read from ~/serverlist which you have to populate with the ip addresses of the servers you want to connect to (each on a separate line).
Mobaxterm solves this better I think (but is not available on Mac OS X, only on Windows). They have a single button that allows you to turn the tabs to each server into a split view and back. Would be great if iTerm would also implement this.