Hi everyone,

I'm thinking of working on HA-Cron and I propose to develop the agent using
the GDS template. Here's the plan I have in mind:

When a failover happens and the crontab service is to be started on a new
machine:

1) Create a backup of the old crontab file with the name 'crontab.old'.
2) Create the new crontab file to be used by copying the old one.
3) Add the new cron jobs to the new crontab file.

There are two possible approaches that we could follow to keep a record of
the cron jobs to be added to the new crontab:

Sample scenario:

CU has 2 services configured - netbackup and oracle.
They need to have some cron jobs running for each service.
For the netbackup service, they need to run a cron job for root user and one
for netbkp user.
For the oracle serivice, they need to run cron job for root and oracle user.

To handle this situation, we could follow either of two methods:

1) Method 1:

/var/spool/cron/crontabs would have files with names <user>.<service_name>.
For the netbackup service, there would be 2 files - root.netbackup and
netbkp.netbackup
For the oracle serivcice, there would be - root.oracle and oracle.oracle
Each of the services (RGs) netbackp and oracle would have a HA-Cron
resource.
The specific HA-Cron resource would take care of making just its
<user>.<service> files HA. When HA-Cron comes online, it would copy over the
contents of these files to the respective <user> file on the node on which
the service is running, and delete them from all the node(s) which do not
host this service.

2) Method 2:

We could have a single configuration file where the cron jobs for each
service are listed and separated in the following format:

# Service: Oracle
<cron job 1>

# Service: Netbackup
<cron job 1>
<cron job 2>

We then simply parse the file, and add the jobs to the crontab file
depending on which services are required in the RG being started.

The stop function can delete the new crontab file and replace it with the
initial backup.

For probing the crontab service, we could probably set demo tasks for the
cron (like creating temp files with time stamps or updating a variable or a
file etc) to check if cron is working well.

Please give me some feedback.

Thanks and regards,

-- 
Lalith Suresh
Department of Computer Engineering
Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur
+91-9982190365 , lalithsuresh.wordpress.com
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