job schedulling

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:19 PM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:03:25AM -0500, Jose wrote:
>> Just a quick question, does anybody has a job scheduler software running
>> for multiplatforms?, we have one IBM from the Tivoli family but is
>> expensive, is anything comparable in Linux?
>
> Maybe not what you're looking for, but... custom-rolled makefile will
> give you "job"-based scheduling, as opposed to "time"-based one.
> The only problem will be writing wrappers for existing applications, so
> that they end up with what "make" looks for.

The trouble with this is elaborated on very nicely in the SunWorld
article that I referenced...

Quoting some relevant bits...

"Unix admins are quick to point out that Unix offers cron, which
handles the basics of simple job scheduling. Mainframe folks, on the
other hand, fall over laughing when anyone suggests that cron provides
adequate scheduling capabilities. And for good reason."

... "In short, cron is pretty much a fancy alarm clock, waking up at
preset times to run a job. Detection of job failure is simplistic, and
it can't rerun a failed job at a later date."

Of course, people propose, "why don't I write a script???"

"To correct this, a lot of people roll their own job management
systems. They use cron to kick off a job controller and create scripts
that detect failure conditions, initiate other jobs, and provide some
modicum of checkpoint/restart capabilities. While these solutions
often work adequately for small job streams, they rarely scale to
handle the job loads of a typical mainframe. They also lack
sophisticated user interfaces and reporting tools that allow you to
keep audit trails of your job streams.

Even worse, a home-grown job scheduler quickly turns into a full-time
programming job. As you increase your dependence on the tool, you'll
find yourself adding more and more features. The result is usually a
hodgepodge of scripts, programs, and Unix utilities that only a few
people actually understand. The thought of basing production job
streams on this kind of solution should make any good admin cringe."

That's pretty "over the top", but it does successfully point out that
there are things valuable about mainframe traditions that have tended
to be absent on Unix.
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