Basically the steps are as follows:
You should establish successful public key authentication so that you don't have to use username/password authentication. For this to work you'll have to create a private/public key pair on the central host where you're going to run your JSF management application.
Here is a small to tutorial. You don't have to use the ssh agent. It's sufficient to create the said key pair on the central host and copy the public key to all remote hosts you want to control. On most modern Linux systems you won't even have to configure the ssh daemons on the remote hosts to allow public key authentication, so this is no big deal.
If you're done with this step you can easily
test it on the console of the central host. You can execute an arbitrary command on a remote host by typing "ssh this.is.your.remote.host your_command" on the command line, for example "ssh host1.yourdomain.com ls -l" will execute the Linux command "ls -l" on host "host1.yourdomain.com". And as I explained above you can use System.getRuntime().exec() to execute an ordinary Linux command from Java code. So I think this step shouldn't be to difficult ;)
To parse your logs on the remote hosts you have different choices as I said. You can use the above method, too, in order to parse the logs with Linux commands and just use the output of the commands you get via the right exec() call.
Or you can configure the remote boxes to directly log to your central host. All popular implementations of the syslog service allow remote logging to a central syslog server. I think this alternative will be easier because you'd only have to do the log file parsing in one place (on your central host) and you can use ordinary Java I/O to access the central log file and parse it with Java's regular expressions or something like this. That's a good
tutorial how to set up a central logging host. This may be more work at first but it will be a lot easier to parse the logs and perhaps add additional remote hosts later.
I hope know it's a bit clearer ;)
Marco
