Advanced Job Scheduling?

Kagato asks: "I'm trying to make my company's Unix boxes more mission critical in the area of job scheduling. Scheduling jobs in Unix has been around since the dawn of time. On most systems you have 'cron' and 'at' to provide most of your scheduling needs. But outside the basic world of 'do this at such time' there are a slew of commercial products that handle dependencies, failure routes, monitoring, dependent notification, etc. Commercial products of this type have been around for years. Is there anything like this available in the GNU and Open Source worlds? I've been looking at Freshmeat, SourceForge and Google. I've found the pickings for advanced scheduling are pretty slim."

Comments

Mission critical?

[CoderDevo]

There may be no open source products out there that match the functionality of the currently available commercial scheduling products.

So here's what you do. Get a dollar figure from management that represents just how "mission critical" job scheduling is at your work. That number becomes your scheduling budget.

If that number is too low to buy software, then I guess scheduling isn't all that critical at your business after all.

Level of sophistication required?

[Zocalo]

It depends upon what level of sophistication you are after, of course, but I've never had any problems getting things like this working with that old UNIX standby: shell scripts.

Basically, what you need to do is use a shell script to wrap around the commands you are scheduling and call the shell script from crons instead. The shell script then takes responsibility for any error handling, email/SMS/pager notifications, failover, or whatever, based on return codes and error messages etc. I've usually found that for most sites it's possible to write a generic template script and a small set of support scripts that do the notifications and what not that cover >75% of crons with no major customisation beyond the exit code "case" statement and the command to be executed.