[Linux-cluster] Centralized Cron

[Harald Kubota]

saju john wrote:
>
>
> Is there any way to make a centalized cron
>

at work (more clusters, all Veritas though) we use autosys, which is 
basically
a program scheduler to start programs on other machines.
cron jobs are for jobs which are for each node (e.g. sending a health status
to a central server once a day), thus bound to a physical machine.
autosys is for everything which can move (cluster service groups, e.g. 
running
a DB cleanup job on the node which runs the DB). Since each
service group has its own IP address and DNS entry, autosys simply connect
to that IP address and executes a script (and does more like checking the
status, handling timeouts, sending out alarms if anything went wrong etc.).

Since autosys is commercial software and required quite some infrastructure,
a simpler approach is to set up one machine (maybe cluster it ;-)
which starts jobs on other machines according to a list it maintains.

Harald