[nycbug-talk] ensuring crons run

[pete wright]

On 1/24/06, N.J. Thomas <njt at ayvali.org> wrote:
> 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?

cfengine is very different than nagios.  nagios will monitor services
and report failures.

cfengine is able to activly monitor the state of machines and take
action depending on the said state of a machine.  it is very
customizable, pretty robust and scales very well.  i use both at my
current job, and find that using cfengine as a replacement for cron,
rdistd and other homegrown scripts to be working pretty well. 
depending on the size of your deployment though (or more realistically
what is at stake if your systems go down), cfengine may be a bit
overkill.

-p


--
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group