Re: Cron management...

Your management issue could be resolved with a configuration management software [1]

A lot of them exist of course. So to choose one you should check the documentation quality, if there's a YouTube channel about it with examples, is there a conference on the topic (which shows that there is a large user base), is there any training and certifications available and in what language is it written? Of course, does it support what you're trying to solve?

I've had the chance to work with Puppet [2], CFengine [3] and SaltStack [4]. Out of that lot, I prefer Salt, but YMMV. Other big names in this field are Chef [5] and Ansible [6].

Some do require an agent on the host, some don't. Your systems admin will need to look at the security of how the agent actually listens to it's master and decide if he can live with the risk?

We use Salt here to manage hosts in four data centers and in AWS. It's great. Plus it already has a module to manage crontabs [7]

If you'd like more info, please feel free to ping me off the list.

HTH, David

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_configuration_management_software

[2] https://puppetlabs.com/

[3] http://cfengine.com/

[4] http://saltstack.com/

[5] https://www.chef.io/

[6] http://www.ansible.com/home

[7]
http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.cron.html#module-salt.modules.cron

> Howdy.
>
> 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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