Good software for centrally managing jobs on mixed OS clients

kayasaman · 03-19-2012, 07:38 AM

Hi,

can anyone suggest a good piece of software corporate or opensource that can be used to manage UNIX cron and MS AT jobs?

I am currently looking at Sypsoft: http://www.sypsoft.com/index.html

which is freeware but there maybe something 'better' around..... which I don't know about.

I have also taken a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...duler_software

which is quite informal but I am not sure as which is worth looking at and which is a waste of time.

Does anyone have any better ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!

acid_kewpie · 03-19-2012, 07:42 AM

Puppet should be able to handle this. It's ace, although the windows side of things is a fair bit newer than the more stable unix code.

kayasaman · 03-20-2012, 03:49 AM

Yeah I've been pestered to learn Puppet for ages but never knew that it could also manage cron/at jobs too.... if that is the case then it's awsome!

Thanks for that

[EDIT]

Hmm... it seems that Puppet can manage cron jobs but only through a crontab and not under /etc/cron.d/

Just discovered this:

Quote:

The built in Puppet type only manages per user crontab files (the kind that exist under /var/spool/cron on Linux). There is currently no built in way to explicitly manage cron file entries under /etc, although you can use many of the other types as a work around.

and checked out a few links for support:

http://www.puppetcookbook.com/posts/...d-entries.html

http://linuxman.wikispaces.com/Creat...ob+with+puppet

Looks like I'm going to need to turn elsewhere or just make the compromise.

acid_kewpie · 03-20-2012, 03:55 AM

well it could always drop files into certain places, which is often more than enough, but it does also have dedicated "cron" and "scheduled-task" objects to use to do it properly. Offhand, I'm not so sure it's possible to remove them though, so dropping a file in cron.d might be a better approach depending on your needs and my recollection of its features.

kayasaman · 03-20-2012, 04:18 AM

... hmm ... ok I guess that makes sense.

How about the MS side of things as I've just been reading the site on puppetlabs but looks like as you said support is quite new.

Additionally since the network is mixed archicture - predominantly MS - support for at jobs is imperative.

acid_kewpie · 03-20-2012, 04:23 AM

well the puppet client for windows is new, but the code is highly portable and generic, so there's not a vast amount of additional work required, not a rewrite by any means, and is being worked on very hard to bring it up to speed. I've never used it against windaz yet though so can't personally comment.

kayasaman · 03-20-2012, 04:25 AM

I've never used Winblowz properly yet so am running blind on this one too....

Thanks for the support though!

acid_kewpie · 03-20-2012, 04:30 AM

As an aside, one key thing I found worked well for puppet is to split the types of client config in to two parts - general widely used configs defined within the node.pp configs and more specific configurations on aribitrary groups / individual clients to be obtained from a web front end like puppet dashboard using ENC lookups. So in the former, all linux hosts need ntp set up according to this one file, whilst in the latter, i want to group these 8 machines as "daves test servers" and make all those machines run the "daves config updates" code, which is still defined on the puppet server, but not associated to any machine by default. Puppet can be so flexible it can be hard to pin down a general way to use it, so I found that approach implicitly kept things tidy.

kayasaman · 03-20-2012, 04:43 AM

Nice

Actually a friend of mine who has been a UNIX engineer for 15 years or more has been pestering me to learn Puppet for quite a few months now. Never had the infrastructure before to take the time to learn it but this **may** be the time now!

I've not got the training VM for Vbox installed and am checking it out.