Re: [gentoo-user] bind-9.7.1_p2 does not want to stop...

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 01:12 on Wednesday 17 November 2010, Stefan G. 
Weichinger did opine thusly:

> Am 2010-11-16 21:55, schrieb Alan McKinnon:
> > I've seen the weirdest inexplicable things from bind (and vixie-cron too,
> > now that I think of it).
>
> OT: what is your recommended alternative to vixie-cron then?


I use vixie-cron anyway, for a few reasons:

- my own inertia on the matter
- I need something to whinge about otherwise my life feels incomplete
- all my servers are multi-user and getting 50+ Cisco jockeys to understand a 
new cron is not worth the effort

I've learnt how to deal with vixie-cron's quirks and just live with it.

I've heard good reports from others about fcron, especially for notebooks and 
desktops that are not running 24/7. fcron has features similar to anacron so 
you can configure scenarios like this:

Run this script once every 24 hour period, at 4am if you can, and if not at 
the earliest point possible. If you can't run it at all in a 24 hour period, 
ignore it and start again tomorrow.

Regular cron simply can't do that. It can't even do something on the last day 
of the month easily .... you do it at 1 minute past midnight on the first of 
the month instead :-)

My girlfriend swears by ControlM, but she forgets that she works in a large 
bank and the interdependency graph of all their scheduled jobs is a fantastic 
beast. She can categorize jobs by importance and have this magic "cron" 
shuffle them around, ignore failures from the minor ones, and have the cell-
phone go beep-beep constantly when a critical script fails. This beep-beep 
wakes me up at 4am which is the main reason I resist using it myself. That and 
the cost - it's an enterprise product with a price tag to match. And complete 
overkill for anything a mere ISP wants to do.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com