I am curious are there implementations where one can send a file over a broadcast address like in IPv4 addresses to multiple end hosts?
For instance can scp perform a file Broadcast to multiple hosts
scp myFile.txt [email protected]:/home/hostname
An obvious way to do instantaneous scp over two or more hosts is by using && operator but what happens when the host numbers are more than 20+
Yes it can be done. Jakuje is right that it cannot be done in TCP, however his reply does not cover UDP, which is instead used exactly for this.
I used for some time this Java program to do this, but then I discovered that Clonezilla can do it,
Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massive clone
and this gave me the motivation to look into how they did it: the authors of Clonezilla themselves state they use UDPCast for this, and this is all: UDPCast's Web page states
UDPcast is a file transfer tool that can send data simultaneously to many destinations on a LAN. This can for instance be used to install entire classrooms of PC's at once. The advantage of UDPcast over using other methods (nfs, ftp, whatever) is that UDPcast uses UDP's multicast abilities: it won't take longer to install 15 machines than it would to install just 2.
It is in the repos for the distros I use (Debian, Kubuntu, Arch Linux), so I presume it will be in just about all repos.
No. It does not work like this. scp works over ssh protocol, which is connection-based (TCP) and therefore it can not do broadcast. It sends data and receives confirmation that the data were received correctly by the other side.
You could do that with significant modification of the client, that would open connection to more servers and would send data over to all of them, but it is not a real broadcast.
