[nycbug-talk] ensuring crons run

[N.J. Thomas]

We have a bunch scripts in cron on different hosts that run hourly,
nightly, etc. Occasionally for various reasons (network outage,
filesystem full, bad input data), things break and the cron scripts
don't run.

What is a good system for ensuring these scripts are executed?

Two solutions that we came up with:

    - log /var/log/cron to a central syslog server, write a script that
      parses this

    - force all users to put code in their crons (at the beginning and
      end) that pings some central db, if the cron doesn't run, neither
      do the pings, and some watchdog script kicks into action

I would imagine that this is not the first time someone has tried to
address this problem. What do you use? Cfengine? Nagios?

thanks,
Thomas

-- 
N.J. Thomas
njt at ayvali.org
Etiamsi occiderit me, in ipso sperabo