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Distribution: Mostly Gentoo, sometimes Debian/(K)Ubuntu
Posts: 143
Rep:
Crontab?
You don't actually need one. You can pass the crontab contents to the crontab executable from stdin. Generate an SSH key and call crontab from that. If you're looking for an extra bit of security, configure your SSH so your "crontab editing" user can only use the "crontab editing" shell to input crontabs.
Thanks Janz for the reply, but what I need is something that will query existing jobs on diff servers then display an interface for folks to input or edit jobs and push them back out. Its for folks who would be in a service center and as such I am looking for more of a "canned" solution if you will. Seems like such a need has to have been met already in some other situation.
Distribution: Mostly Gentoo, sometimes Debian/(K)Ubuntu
Posts: 143
Rep:
Why?
Most people, who operate a really large number of servers use some general management tool like Puppet or cfengine for such tasks. However, they are write-only though.
We have a nice grouping of servers from a company we just bought out that has a system we are still in the process of understanding with very little help from its engineers and former employees. As we have began to inspect this system we find it uses the holy crap out of cron jobs to provide dynamic customer service solutions. Were talking about self contained devices that sit on networks all over the US. Currently about 400 or so devices. Customer calls in with a problem, half the time the service person can respond by SSH into a machine looking at the cron jobs and then edit or delete a job in question to address the problem.
These devices are going to be phased out hopefully within the next 6-8 mths as contracts are re-negotiated and our product put in its place, but in the meantime we need to continue to provide support for them and the current model of the ssh and edit is super ineffective. I just think the team downstairs would benefit from having a single interface to click the site #/server they need to edit and push from there. Keep in mind our team is not in the habit of SSh to servers and even using Cron statements so they have gone out of their way to learn how to support these devices.
I have installed the latest version of webmin and see the cron grouping there, it just requires that every server you want to look at also has webmin installed. This could be a quick and dirty solution for what im looking for. But whatever tool I use needs to have the ability to read from current cron jobs in place so we can see whats going on at each site level.
Distribution: Mostly Gentoo, sometimes Debian/(K)Ubuntu
Posts: 143
Rep:
O my
O my goodness. That's tough luck. I don't think, there is a software for this. If you have some details on the systems running, I might have some spare time to start an open source project on this.
Edit: I wrote this message from my phone. Some details I would require:
- Do you wish to have an SSH solution or would you rather have a management daemon?
- Do you have a way to distribute SSH keys over your nodes?
- What kind of cron daemon are you running?
- Do you wish to manage system crontabs or user crontabs only?
- Do you have a grouped list of hosts in some sort of database?
- Does a web interface suit you well?
- Do you have someone who would write an interface under a F/OSS license if I wrote the management backend?
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