[Labs-l] Changes to cron on tools

[Mr. Maximilian Doerr]

I assume that means it should make tools-login more stable as well, since the crontab will auto adapt crontab entries to use jsub and not login.

On Mar 24, 2014, at 4:43 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:

> Hey all,
> 
> We've had difficulty in the past with cron jobs not running for a number
> of reasons (the primary being an overloaded bastion because of bots
> running on it), so I made a few changes to how cron is to be used in the
> future to vastly improve reliability:
> 
> a) cron for tools will now be executed from a different, dedicated
> server that serves only that purpose.  This will insulate the bastions
> from running cron jobs, and vice-versa.
> 
> b) the 'crontab' executable will edit the crontabs /on that host/
> directly (so there will be no need to change how you're doing thing);
> regardless of which bastion you run it from.  (So, from tools-login or
> tools-dev, crontab will access the same schedule).
> 
> c) crontabs will be automatically edited to add a prefix to send your
> jobs to the grid with reasonable default values unless the entry already
> invokes jsub, jstart or qsub.  If the crontab program does that, it will
> tell you so that you can inspect and edit the entries and adapt them to
> your needs.
> 
> Those three measures will result in considerably more reliable execution
> of scheduled jobs, as well as improved performance on the bastion hosts.
> 
> FOR THE NEXT WEEK OR SO:  both systems will be available at the same
> time.  You can use the new system on the submit host by using 'xcrontab'
> rather than 'crontab' to set or edit your crontab.  Be aware that /both/
> schedules will be executed unless you also remove your bastion crontab.
> 
> AT THE END OF THAT WEEK:  any crontabs you may have had on tools-login
> or tools-bastion will be moved to the new server, and 'crontab' will be
> made to use the new system exclusively.  You have no intervention to
> make; this will be done automatically.
> 
> -- Marc
> 
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