Re: centralized cron

From: Michael Vilain (vilain_at_spamcop.net)
Date: 09/07/04 

Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 14:08:48 -0700

In article <chl1ue$osp$0$216.39.155.144@theriver.com>,
 dagon@dagon.net (Mark Rafn) wrote:

> ITchick <brigit_anderson@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Does anyone know of a tool that will centralize cron jobs? I have
> >hundreds of servers, each with their own cron jobs set up, and would
> >like to centrally manage the jobs from one location. Any advice would
> >be appreciated. Thanks.
>
> I don't know of anything specific to cron for this, but a number of options
> come to mind. CVS, rsync or NFS for the cron spools might work (with a cron
> job to reread the files if necessary for your cron). Using ssh to run crontab
> commands is pretty easily automated as well.

You're talking about a "job scheduling" software package. Don't expect
to find something that's free or cheap unless you write your own.

The one that was under consideration at my last contract was AutoSys.
It allowed for jobs to be scheduled and managed from a central console
and single system. We had it because there was significant business
processing that depended on multiple systems. It was handled in cron
and was very difficult to manage on multiple systems. Any sort of
change from the day-to-day schedule screwed it up and required editing
multiple crontabs. We were going to use it to manage a datacenter and
20 SUN Enterprise servers, but it could also run clients on NT.

AutoSys required network access to _all_ systems it managed and a
commercial database to hold the scheduling tables (we had Oracle, but
YMMV). The Oracle database had to be up 7x24 as did the scheduling
system which required significant modifications to our backup strategy
(we did daily full cold backups on all systems).

This might be way overkill for what you want. Perhaps a standardized
crontab on many systems? For that, you'll need a process to store the
crontab files (CVS? RCS?) and distribute them to many machines (push it
out from a master or pull from server(s)).

Overall, this is a project that should be looked at from requirements,
design, and implementation. I don't think you'll really go very far
until you fully outline the requirements (which you didn't really
describe here--hint, hint). 

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