[mdlug] Better job scheduler

[Michael S. Mikowski]

Hi Michael:

Your question got me interested, as I may also have a need similar to this.  Here is the 
most interesting find I made, which seems like it might fit your needs:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/airbnb-open-sources-its-chronos-scheduler-a-more-flexible-cron-replacement-with-a-web-based-gui/[1] 

and:

https://mesosphere.com/docs/tutorials/run-chronos-on-mesos/#[2] 

Now that does look like a fair amount of work, but I guess it depends on the level of your 
needs.

Now if you don't require fault tolerance, a simple cron web manager might suffice.  I have 
one on my Synology NAS which is pretty decent.  No fancy ACLs, and a nice interface.  Not 
sure how portable it is though.

There is also minicron.  Sorry, it's written in Ruby :(, but it otherwise looks decent.

https://github.com/jamesrwhite/minicron[3] 

You could also look at hosted services.  Here are a few that are free to try.  You might want 
to spend the whopping $20/yr or so though for enterprise-class service.

http://webcron.org/[4]

https://www.setcronjob.com/[5]

I hope that is helpful!

Cheers, Mike



On Monday, March 16, 2015 11:46:14 PM Michael ORourke wrote:
> Lug Nuts,
> 
> Our company has a requirement for a job scheduler that runs on linux
> which would have a simple web UI that can show the status of running
> jobs, display a list of scheduled jobs along with a way to
> add/change/delete jobs.  No advanced ACLs are needed at this time. But
> something that is easy to use, much like the Windows task scheduler.
> However one feature that was requested is for a job crash notification.
> Sounds simple enough, but what constitutes a job "crash"?  I'm glad you
> asked...
> Say you have a scheduled job that runs at 1:00pm every day, and it takes
> around 15 mins to execute.  Suppose at 1:03pm, an admin logs into the
> box and does a quick reboot, not realizing the 1:00pm job was currently
> running.  So because the job normally spams the support staff, they
> don't even notice that the 1:00pm job never finishes, until someone
> calls the support line the next day and complains that we did not
> process their 1:00pm file from yesterday. Okay, maybe that's not the
> exact scenario, but you get the idea.
> A better scenario, after the box is rebooted, the scheduler wakes up and
> looks for leftover PID files under /var/run or similar.  When it can't
> find the corresponding running job, then it pages the support on-call,
> "job #???? was terminated unexpectedly", or something like that.
> Sending a success/fail email is just not reliable enough, and these
> notifications tend to get ignored anyways.
> Any suggestions/recommendations/ideas?
> 
> Thanks,
> Mike
> 
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--------
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/airbnb-open-sources-its-chronos-scheduler-a-more-flexible-cron-replacement-with-a-web-based-gui/
[2] https://mesosphere.com/docs/tutorials/run-chronos-on-mesos/#
[3] https://github.com/jamesrwhite/minicron
[4] http://webcron.org/
[5] https://www.setcronjob.com/