Cron management...

We currently have about 30 Redhat Linux servers running Oracle 11.2

Recently for a short time the crontab entry for a production backup was commented out.

Just last week one of the DBAs had "accidently" deleted all the backup scripts. The scripts directory is NFS mounted so it impacted every server.

The Netbackup folks like to do maintenance during the day. Any Oracle backups that may have been running abort. These days we get notice from the Netbackup folks but it's kinda tricky to check 30 servers and determine if anything is running. Or kick off 30+ archive log backup scripts across all the servers to clean up the archive log directories before the Netbackup maintenance.

Managing crontabs, jobs and scripts across 30 servers just doesn't seem to be working.

Our company uses a job scheduling app called Tidal. The manager of that app demo'd the product to me and it seems like it can address many of our headaches. In theory a single simple interface to manage all the jobs scheduled across all the database servers.

However one of the issues identified by the Linux admin is that the Tidal agent needs root access so he is reluctant to install the Tidal agent anywhere but a couple of designated Tidal servers.

I am wondering if other sites have stopped using crontab? If so then what did you replace it with?

Anyway, I am open to any thoughts, suggestions, etc.

Thanks,
Chris Grabowy

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