Re: [gentoo-user] Recommendations for scheduler

[J. Roeleveld]

On Saturday, August 02, 2014 11:33:30 AM Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 01/08/2014 23:13, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> > On 1 August 2014 19:32:36 CEST, Alan McKinnon
<alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> Up-front disclaimer: Mostly [OT] post. But at least I'll test drive it
> >> on Gentoo before putting it in production :-)
> >>
> >> New job, new environment. Existing persons suffer from
> >> 5-year-old-with-a-hammer syndrome and assume cron is the solution
to
> >> all
> >> ills. Result: a towering edifice of cron jobs that may or may not
> >> clobber each other's work, may or may not work at all, and
implement no
> >> error handling at all. But my god, can they spew out mail from STOUT
> >>
> >>
> >> But cron has only one event trigger: wall-clock time. And it's a very
> >> blunt weapon. I'm looking for recommendations of alternative
schedulers
> >> that satisfy real-world business needs that need some other event
> >> trigger than what the time is right now.
> >>
> >> For those familiar with it, I'm looking for something with the useful
> >> feature set, without the useless features and without the price tag
of
> >> ControlM
> >>
> >> Anyone care to share experiences?
> >
> > I'm also looking for a free alternative.
> > At most of my clients, I see Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) being used
a
> > lot.
> >
> > It has most things what you want from an intelligent multi host
scheduler.
> > Unfortunately,  it also comes with a corresponding price tag.
> I have an unusual boss. He's a business owner and quite naturally
> profit-driven. He also employs smart people and expects us to maintain
> systems in-house.
>
> He's also a zealous FLOSS fan.
>
> So when I present him a price tag for software his first question is
> always "is there any free as in freedom software suited for the job?"

Depends on the specific requirements.
If you want:
- time based start of a schedule
- dependencies in said schedules and between schedules which can delay 
the actual start
- stop of schedule if error occurs
- ability to restart schedule from crashed point
- have schedules operate over multiple machines (eg. part run on 
database, some on a compute-cluster, some other bit making nice graphs 
and printing it,...)

Then you might be out of luck.
If anyone has something that is already going along these lines, please let 
me know. I am more then willing to spend time and effort to assist in the 
development. Doing a project like that on my own in my extremely limited 
free time is not really an option.

> I'm still trying to wrap my brains around dealing with a boss that
> thinks like this :-)

Hehe :)

--
Joost