Re: Strategy for "one-off" tasks

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, Ferguson, Steve wrote:
>Yes, but cron has no capability to distribute a script to over a hundred
>systems.  Scripts to change over time, and in our environment NFS is not
>usable between our internal and our DMZ hosts.  So some sort of copying
>mechanism (preferably one that supports encryption) is required.
>
>I guess my view is that if I've gone to all the trouble to set up cfengine,
>and it comes with all these neat bells and whistles, I'd like to actually
>use them.

What's stopping you from using cfengine to copy the scripts and set up the
cron job, and using cron to run it periodically?  I do this for exactly this
reason.

>Because I can come up with a viable strategy, I plan to use it.  cron
>doesn't meet my needs, additionally because I might decide I need an audit
>before the next cron run was scheduled.  With cfengine I can do an immediate
>cfrun.  With cron, no such luck.

I have to admit that I don't use cfrun at all; I have cfengine manage ssh
keys and scripts and cron jobs -- if I want to run a script outside of cron
I'd use ssh.

Of course that won't help you if you need to run the script on many machines
at once that satisy some class :-)

-- 
jaq@spacepants.org                           http://spacepants.org/jaq.gpg