Mussh is a shell script that allows you to execute a command or script over ssh on multiple hosts with one command. When possible mussh will use ssh-agent and RSA/DSA keys to minimize the need to enter your password more than once.
logging for shell scripts turned out to be very slow or not as powerful as log4j or log4perl. By using log4console as agent for catching the log messages and using log4perl for formatting and categorizing the messages things are speeded up.