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Making CRON easy to use

 
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Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 9:03:26 AM   
wri6067

 

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I am a systems admin faced with porting a lot of batch applications from Solaris to Windows. My current challenge is to find a scheduling solution that is easy to use, reliable, and easy to use. Did I mention, it should be easy to use? It should also support a combination of Windows commands and SFU commands in any given job.

SFU Cron is the obvious choice, and I've always found cron easy to use on Solaris, but the combination of telnet, cron and vi as the EDITOR on my Windows 2003 servers seems to be very quirky. Has anyone implemented an environment like this? Did you encounter trouble with vi as your crontab editor? Did you find a solid combination of tools? If so, how is your system configured? It seems like telnet/vi for crontabs is just very unpredictable on my systems.

Thanks,
Don
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RE: Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 2:24:30 PM   
Rodney

 

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Yes, people are using cron to fire off jobs with Interix (the Unix part of SFU)
all the time (err, no pun intended). You can run Win32 actions but you need to know
that those Win32 program often want a console window or have stdin/stdout/stderr to
handle types Win32 i/o can deal with (Win32 apps aren't as flexible as Unix apps on
this point). So file redirection is usually needed (e.g. "winapp < /dev/null > /file").

The telnet connection with the Interix daemons is Unix based and vi uses curses.
So if you are having a problem it likely points to the setting for the environment
variable "TERM". What's your setting for TERM?

(in reply to wri6067)
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RE: Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 3:02:20 PM   
wri6067

 

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Hi Rodney,

I was actually using the Windows Cron service and the Windows telnet service, though the idea about the TERM setting might still have a lot to do with it. The most comnmon telnet client we use is the Windows telnet client that comes with the PC OS.

(in reply to Rodney)
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RE: Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 3:10:23 PM   
markfunk

 

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Don't forget that SFU3.5 shipped with two (2) different cron applications
and two different versions of telnet server (tlntsvr, telnetd).

There's the Interix cron daemon (/usr/sbin/cron)
and there's the "Windows Cron service" (%SFUDIR%/common/cron.exe).
There is also two different crontab utils - one for each cron application.

Not sure which ones you are using.

For a Unix sysadmin, the most satisfying experience is achieved by using
only Interix telnetd and cron daemon - mainly because your are also wanting to use
vi, and vi is an Interix app.
Trying to use Interix vi with Windows telnet server is not recommended because they
aren't designed to work together.

(in reply to Rodney)
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RE: Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 3:12:14 PM   
markfunk

 

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Ok, so maybe you want to install the Win32 version of gvim and use that instead
of Interix's vi. Setting TERM will _not_ help the way Interix vi works with
Windows telnet server.

(in reply to markfunk)
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RE: Making CRON easy to use - Aug. 4, '06, 4:04:23 PM   
Rodney

 

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My assumption is that if your moving batch script from Solaris then, likely,
most of the scripts will be Unix-based with a bit of Win32 occationally.
In such cases I'd suggest using the Interix cron and telnet.
Then vi will be fine in this context.

If you're using mostly Win32 commands then the Win32 tools may be the choice.

It won't matter what the telnet client is because a terminal is a terminal and
curses can handle that. I'd raised TERM being a potential issue because sometime
people just set "vt100" for everything when what they're using has a different
setting/name.

(in reply to markfunk)
Post #: 6
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