SwitchTower with public key authentication

ruby-talk
1

Hello,

I am developing what we may call a "distributed video player" in Ruby (this is
NOT a Rails application). It works this way: I have several boxes that play
videos and one server, where I store the contents I will later send to the
playing boxes (videos are played from local files, not streamed).

When I want to play a video, I want to play it at once in every box, so I must
send it to every playing box, wait for the files to transfer to every box,
then send a "play" command to every box.

I'm thinking of using SwitchTower to automate that step. The problem is the
password to transfer the files. I've read
http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/97 and it looks like I need to
have the same password for all servers. I don't like this approach very much,
I think it's not very secure.

So the question is: is it possible to use public key authentication in
SwitchTower?

- --
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(En general no puedo contestar antes de 10 días)

2

I don't know that switchtower is your best option here. Why not simply
set up the main computer as an NFS or FTP server with the movies on it?
You could have the other computers load a file every minute or so that
would contain instructions to play a certain movie file at a certain
time. This is the simplest way I can think of and would also guarantee
that they play it together if their clocks are synchronised (the main
computer could be set up for NTP as well).