www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/cfengine/cfengine-Tutorial_61.html

search

	Buy GNU books!

GNU cfengine

5. Using cfengine as a front end for cron

One of cfengine's strengths is its use of classes to identify systems from a single file or set of files. Many administrators think that it would be nice if the cron daemon also worked in this way. One possible way of setting up cron from a global configuration would be to use the cfengine editfiles facility to edit each cron file separately. A much better way is to use cfengine's time classes to work like a user interface for cron. This allows you to have a single, central cfengine file which contains all the cron jobs on your system without losing any of the fine control which cron affords you. All of the usual advantages apply:

• It is easier to keep track of what cron jobs are running on the system when you have everything in one place.

• You can use all of your carefully crafted groups and user-defined classes to identify which host should run which programs.

The central idea behind this scheme is to set up a regular cron job on every system which executes cfagent at frequent intervals. Each time cfagent is started, it evaluates time classes and executes the shell commands defined in its configuration file. In this way we use cfagent as a wrapper for the cron scripts, so that we can use cfengine's classes to control jobs for mulitple hosts. Cfengine's time classes are at least as powerful as cron's time specification possibilities, so this does not restrict you in any way, See section 5.3 Building flexible time classes. The only price is the overhead of parsing the cfengine configuration file.

To be more concrete, imagine installing the following `crontab' file onto every host on your network:

# # Global Cron file # 0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/cfexecd -F

5.1 Structuring `cfagent.conf'
5.2 Splaying host times
5.3 Building flexible time classes
5.4 Choosing a scheduling interval