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This is what the Change Advisory Board is for. Ever heard of a CAB meeting? Sometimes Downtime is mandatory. If you have other deployments that cannot be handled with a rolling update then piggy back during that deploy.

Also, Since we are most likely dealing with AWS or some other virtualization an entirely new cluster could be rolled out if engineered correctly, and the traffic routed to the new cluster.

ITIL :
http://www.bmc.com/guides/itil...

SAFe:
http://www.scaledagileframewor...

I suggest you read this. IPv4 is a hack.

Just check out bmc.com and look at their IT Asset Management page. BMC IT Asset Management

*blink* ...

Seriously Rob - go back up and check the comment thread ... you have wandered off track here - I'm not entirely surprised given how many threads you are responding to but seriously... re-read the trail...

I will reiterate I am not the anonymous coward who made the 5% comment - I was never part of that argument or discussion ... we had a brief foray into discussing ohloh statistics and how much meaning it's possible to derive from them elsewhere with some incredible twisting of the stats that you performed but that's it...

My comment in this chain of comments was merely replying to the first 'Palestrina' comment I saw going down the page to ask for your view on the negative light from that blog and for curiosity on why you use such a different nick here than elsewhere ... I mean it's not even remotely similar!

I understand you are feeling under pressure and that there is a general negative stance towards Apache Open Office for many reasons but there is no need to be on such an offensive posture ... I once visited your blog daily and praised your opinion and level headedness during the MS OOXML ISO saga with much of the information in a blog post I wrote at the time learned from your writing but this lashing out at present is pretty poor behaviour.

So before you accuse me of changing the subject for a third time let me remind you I am not that anonymous coward ...

Oh and I had a look at ohloh in more detail and I do see it hitting trunk ... over three times as many LOC for less features... ouch...

Sorry you've had issues with BMC products; but sounds like an old version, check for an update. You can also communicate with other users and developers on the community site who may have been able to resolve, or find workarounds, for these problems. https://communities.bmc.com/

Have you looked at BladeLogic? (full disclosure: I worked for BladeLogic and stayed on after BMC Software bought BladeLogic) Official product page here.

BMC BladeLogic Operations Manager, to give the thing its full name, does multi-platform policy-driven patch management (Windows, RH, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX) and makes it pretty seamless. No *BSD support, though, which may be an issue for you.

I am talking about the clod who stole the laptop to use himself, and not the clod who stole the laptop to get info on it....he would use a tool that reads the cache to retrieve the unencrypted version of the password, and decrypt the whole drive....such as linked How to decrypt a disk

There are many ways to decrypt encryption, of which I am sure you know everything about...so I will let you ponder while I create my steganographized matter.

Article hints to BMC Remedy Change Management Application

I would think that a company managing 7000+ servers would have an automated patch scheduling system similar to BMC Marimba Altiris, or Opsware. You surely don't have time to purchase and install one of these mosters now, but it might be wise to pursue in the future.

There are also some GPL things that may work. Can't think of them right off hand. If these are *nux desktops/servers, you have plenty of time to write a perl/bash/python to accomplish the task. Some other slashdot user is going to have to give you advice for a windows environment at this stage of the game you are in.

I've been using Remedy (http://www.bmc.com/remedy/) too. You can buy one of their nice but expensive out-of-the-box tools like BMC Remedy Service Desk. Or you can make one yourself with Action Request System in which you create forms and workflow without coding.

Yes it can manage across a cluster, but I'm pretty sure you can run it with a single (local) node in the cluster and all jobs with run locally. I haven't tried that, but in theory...

Have a look at the msub command

The syntax is rather weird, but it seems to have everything you wanted. Except I can't quite work out whether it does dependency management. It seems like it should, but I haven't worked out how.

As for Quartz, you didn't actually specify what language you wanted, or how much programming you were willing to do.
Java can call native processes. Quartz has builtin (but poorly documented) support for calling out to the OS to run commands.
It has the foundations to do everything you asked for. Maybe java isn't an option for you, but if you dig a bit, it probably will work.

I am aware that you're after a batch scheduluer, but the thing is, once you get past the cron style schedulers, the next level up tend to have remote job management (etc) so don't let the fact that Torque markets itself as a cluster manager put you off too much. (of course if it really doesn't handle dependencies, then that's a good reason to ditch it)

What you're really asking for is something like Control-M from BMC software. But it's not open source, and it's not cheap.

..I ever got a Christmas Bonus from was BMC Software. The way they did it was everyone upto a certain salary level got a $500 bonus. Anyone making over $60K (I believe, might've been higher) didn't get the bonus.

And they held killer Christmas parties. Everyone dressed to the 9s, free food, two free drinks (and then its a cash bar). A separate party for the kids with a visit from Santa and presents. Hell, the 1st year I worked there (actually, it was my 3rd day) they had the Christmas party in Houston. They paid for everyone in Austin to come over (reimbursed $.33/mile. I made money by driving to Houston for that party) and put everyone up in the hotel the party was at for free.

I can't imagine many companies can afford to do this now.

BMC have a good few Linux server mananagement stuff. BMC Patrol is one of them.

And so do Candle: Omegamon XE for Linux

We are currently finalizing a scheduling tool purchase for the company I work for. We have taken a look at the commercial job schedulers available and we are down to two that best fit our needs. #1 -Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and #2 - Job Scheduler. We are choosing them for a Windows 2000 platform but they all have Unix agents and other platforms available as well. Here the others we looked at:

ActiveBatch32
UC4
Unicenter Autosys Job Management
Control-M
I wish this was a post back in August.

Good Luck!

Users are able to change and reset passwords 24x7 from any Web browser or automated telephone system. They can solve their own password problems immediately instead of calling the helpdesk or a sysadmin.

Control-SA's bi-directional management capabilities automatically detect and propagate user-initiated password changes throughout the enterprise, ensuring that a user's passwords on all platforms are always synchronized.

For example, if someone changes their password in Solaris, Control-SA will immediately propogate that new password to their accounts on Novell, Active Directory, RACF, NIS, LDAP, Oracle, etc.

I enjoy working as a developer for BMC.

Users are able to change and reset passwords 24x7 from any Web browser or automated telephone system. They can solve their own password problems immediately instead of calling the helpdesk or a sysadmin.

Control-SA's bi-directional management capabilities automatically detect and propagate user-initiated password changes throughout the enterprise, ensuring that a user's passwords on all platforms are always synchronized.

For example, if someone changes their password in Solaris, Control-SA will immediately propogate that new password to their accounts on Novell, Active Directory, RACF, NIS, LDAP, Oracle, etc.

I enjoy working as a developer for BMC.

Nokia Ventures is in on paypal, as the article states. Nokia Ventures focuses portfolio priority on mobility and IP related businesses. BMC Software is a partner, along with Nokia and others, in Nokia Ventures. BMC deals with business solutions, that wonderful catch-all, but a look on their site will tell you these people are very supply-chain oriented.

This is of course jumping to many conclusions reeking more of wishful thinking than any sense of reality, but the potential for synergy here just tickles me silly...

I'm picturing an entire order-shipping-billing cycle, along with the obligatory online supply chain management system, all operated from PDA's and/or cell phones...

Any suit with a geek-streak such as me is no doubt drooling by now.

• Copyright on scientific communications (published articles and so forth) belongs to publishing companies and not to authors, for most publications. Scientists wishing to share relevant communications, even their own in some cases, face legal challenges from publishers.
• Publishing companies charge expensive subscriptions to access scientific communications. Scientists in developing countries and poorly-endowed institutions, although intellectually on par with their peers, are severely hindered by this.
• These two problems have prevented scientists from gaining any access, even for simple searches, to the full text of these communications.
• Scientific communications are published in journals segregated by topic. This has resulted in confusion as to the best place to publish, retrieve or extract (using computer automation) information (e.g., mathematical biology communications could be published in either a mathematical journal or a biological one).
• Communications are also published in journals differing by publisher. This has caused the segregation of communications by the prestige of the journal (e.g., how difficult it is to be published in the journal and the composition of the readership). This has also allowed room for personal politics in scientific communication.
• These two problems are compounded by the first two: with a limited budget, to which journals should one subscribe? What we are left with is an artificial selection, by publishers, of which communications are best suited to a scientist's field of study.
• This may be the result of a competitive marketplace for readership, but is there an alternative to profit-based publications? Should there be? Can an alternative publication model be profitable for a publisher?
• Additionally, even with the advent of computers, databases, and the World Wide Web, scientific communications are published as they were 100 years ago: as linear, printable text. And they are archived this way. While this makes good reading, it is not the best format for information retrieval or extraction.
• All of these problems restrict information retrieval, extraction, and scientific inquiry. How do we resolve them? As the ultimate solution, should future communications be published in an "open-access, global knowledge-base"? Before or after information extraction techniques are applied?

Bioinformatics.org, an organization committed to freedom and openness in the field of bioinformatics (a very commercial field), is hosting a joint conference on open-access publications and informatiion extraction in the biological sciences. We have sought several speakers who can address how the above problems might be solved. They come from the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and PubGene (mentioned on Slashdot before).

The conference will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, and there is room for more attendees. The first 50 can in fact register for free.

--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

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Full disclosure: I work for this software company as a developer. It's a great company - happily employed.

We offer a product that does this: "Control-SA"

BMC Sofware Security Management Solutions

You can centrally manage user accounts and group profiles for a wide variety of systems. You can take it further by assigning employees to roles which causes user accounts to be created with the necessary authority to do their specific job.

The Control-SA server runs on UNIX; the administration GUI runs on NT or UNIX.

Password synchronization is done by catching the password when it is changed on a system and sending it out to that user's accounts on other systems. Passwords are not stored in Control-SA. Another way to do password synch is to use the "Control-SA PassPort" product which lets users type in their new password in a HTTPS(SSL) web page. The new password then gets pushed out to their accounts by our server.

I have a question though. How will you synchronize passwords on California's state mainframes without requiring software to be installed on them?

Sorry for the advertisement, but I have a lot of respect for this product and my co-workers. It is very popular with large & medium companies and government agencies.

Full disclosure: I work for this software company as a developer. It's a great company - happily employed.

We offer a product that does this: "Control-SA"

BMC Sofware Security Management Solutions

You can centrally manage user accounts and group profiles for a wide variety of systems. You can take it further by assigning employees to roles which causes user accounts to be created with the necessary authority to do their specific job.

The Control-SA server runs on UNIX; the administration GUI runs on NT or UNIX.

Password synchronization is done by catching the password when it is changed on a system and sending it out to that user's accounts on other systems. Passwords are not stored in Control-SA. Another way to do password synch is to use the "Control-SA PassPort" product which lets users type in their new password in a HTTPS(SSL) web page. The new password then gets pushed out to their accounts by our server.

I have a question though. How will you synchronize passwords on California's state mainframes without requiring software to be installed on them?

Sorry for the advertisement, but I have a lot of respect for this product and my co-workers. It is very popular with large & medium companies and government agencies.

Full disclosure: I work for this software company as a developer. It's a great company - happily employed.

We offer a product that does this: "Control-SA"

BMC Sofware Security Management Solutions

You can centrally manage user accounts and group profiles for a wide variety of systems. You can take it further by assigning employees to roles which causes user accounts to be created with the necessary authority to do their specific job.

The Control-SA server runs on UNIX; the administration GUI runs on NT or UNIX.

Password synchronization is done by catching the password when it is changed on a system and sending it out to that user's accounts on other systems. Passwords are not stored in Control-SA. Another way to do password synch is to use the "Control-SA PassPort" product which lets users type in their new password in a HTTPS(SSL) web page. The new password then gets pushed out to their accounts by our server.

I have a question though. How will you synchronize passwords on California's state mainframes without requiring software to be installed on them?

Sorry for the advertisement, but I have a lot of respect for this product and my co-workers. It is very popular with large & medium companies and government agencies.

I have never used a more incompentently designed piece of software in my life.

It may well be all that and a bag of chips for NT, but do not under any circumstances use this bloated piece of crap on Unix. I spent months and months trying to make it work at a previous job on Solaris, HP/UX and AIX, and it never did, even when I followed all of the published documents to the letter -- CA's Unix support is a joke, an absolute joke.

Boycott Computer Associates.

Use something that's worthwhile: BMC Patrol or Tivoli rock Unicenter's world.

Linux will be supported as a second tier OS in the next release, 3.3.01, i believe. probably before the end of the year. Patrol currently supports many OSs, solaris, aix, hpux, nt, etc.

Apparently there is much call in europe for this, as a beta version of the port and the unix KM were tested out there.

PATROL is good not only for monitoring your system and applications (like oracle or web servers) but it can also react with recovery actions to fix problems when they occur.

Like any other software vendor, if you want a Linux port, tell BMC about it!
www.bmc.com

You connect up to each agent with a "Patrol Console", and from there you can view the status of the agent, and the resources it monitors.

There is SNMP support built in, and agents can talk to each other.

I'm currently writing a KM for Patrol (I dont work for BMC) and have my own opinions of coding under the Patrol "environment" *ahem*

You can check out BMC's description of Patrol here. I work for these guys