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Advanced Job Scheduling?

Posted by Cliff on from the beyond-at-and-cron dept.

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."

1 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Job scheduling by dhall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Unfortunately I've found job scheduling commercial software to often be less reliable then cron/at jobs. There are a few nice features available to them that is not available in cron/at.

    1. the ability to list ancestors/descendant jobs, the first job(s) must complete before the next job is kicked off. Of course you must break up your job into smaller components.

    2. cross platform scheduling, the ability to schedule jobs on more then one platform. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to schedule for jobs to be kicked off on NT or what not, but what about the mainframe?

    3. central log maintence, if done correctly can keep the jobs in sync, which can be vitally important when you've got jobs that span your entire environment.

    I really wish there was a unix based solution that encompassed all of these. There's a probably a good reason as to why there isn't an open source/"free" alternative for this process. The people who need it are less likely to use a free product. You're dealing with people so entrenched in archaic business practices, that it is difficult sometimes to authorize the use perl in your environment without going through weeks of business jutification.

    It's easy to setup an existing framework to work correctly on Unix. Computer Associates has one. At times it seems to be the most bass-ackwards implementation I have seen, but then I have to remember it was originally designed for the mainframe.