Re: Strategy for "one-off" tasks

[Frank Smith]

--On Thursday, July 10, 2003 15:34:06 -0700 Darren Dunham <ddunham@taos.com> 
wrote:

>> 
>> But to run another one-time-only later then you need another
>> filename, and you can't ever remove them or it will run
>> again.  The other idea of year.month.day.hr seems cleaner,
>> but then there is no assurance that the command will run at
>> all (if there is a network problem, for example, during that
>> hourly run).  I get a couple of failed connection errors a day
>> from remote hosts).
> 
> I think the idea is "why would you need to perform a one-time-only
> task"?  Can you give an example of what this would be?  Why would it not
> need to be performed if a machine were being installed?  (possibly for a
> conversion of somthing)?
>

One example:
   
   We have a bunch of web servers that connect to a farm of database servers
on the same private subnet, and the connection goes through a load balancer.
The database servers need a static route set for each web server pointing to
the load balancer, so the web server will get the reply back from the same
IP it sent the request to (the load balancer).
   When we add a new web server, we need to add a route to each database
server.  Using "AppendIfNoSuchLine" works fine for adding to the init
script, but we also need to run a shellcomand one-time-only to add the
route now instead of on the next reboot (which is probably many months
from now).


--
Frank Smith                                             fsmith@hoovers.com
Systems Administrator                                  Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                          Fax: 512-374-4501