[ale] Cron Management

DJ-Pfulio djpfulio at jdpfu.com
Tue Jan 19 10:39:19 EST 2016


Actually, if you want to have things happen over and over and over without human
intervention, perhaps puppet is the better answer.  Sure, you could use Ansible
in that way, but if you follow security best practices and NEVER, EVER, let a
developer onto a production system - NOT EVER!!!!!!!   then you only have to
deal with rogue admins changing things outside the devops tool ... or crackers.
 Crackers usually leave crumbs behind, so if you find re-running an ansible
script more than once a week is needed to "fix" settings back to desired state,
look for rogues on the box.

But, yes, you could run cron on the ansible workstation to cause the cron-stuff
to be pushed to all the other ansible-managed machines, if you like.  Sometimes
it is nice to use ansible to modify all the systems with 1 command. I use it
that way all-the-time.  Plus there isn't really any extra setup needed beyond
ssh (if you have keys, that's even easier, but not mandatory).

I think people who use ansible to manage puppet generally use Ansible's dynamic
inventory capabilities to create the puppet inventories, but I dunno. All the CA
crap that puppet/chef needed, plus having to install ruby on servers stopped my
puppet knowledge from grow too much.  Nothing against ruby (I enjoy the
language), but installing another language on a server just to manage it? Srsly?!

Ansible rocks. I can confirm this. ;)


On 01/19/2016 10:23 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> So one can run a cron job to have ansible push cron jobs...
> 
> Irony :-)
> 
> Cron management is a pain. Satellite server and spacewalk had cron
> management through a file push similar to what ansible does. It is time
> manageable as well with the ability to schedule configuration changes per
> machine or cluster.
> On Jan 19, 2016 9:05 AM, "James Sumners" <james.sumners at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at dsservices.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> These days a lot of folks are using things like Puppet or Ansible (which
>>> is now owned by RedHart) for central control.  I've not used them but they
>>> appear to have scheduling.
>>
>>
>> Ansible doesn't "have scheduling," per se. You can use Ansible to define
>> schedules. You can use it to drop files in /etc/cron.d (or whatever) or use
>> the cron module to schedule jobs. But you have to run Ansible yourself to
>> do it (or schedule it to be done).
>>
>>


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