41–50 of 63 posts
1. http://jason.the-graham.com/2013/03/06/how-to-use-systemd-ti...
so... cron's a 200kb self contained C program, super simple, does one thing, and does it well. Chronos is built on top of frameworks, needs a few services to run. Certainly it has value, but marketing it as a cron replacement is wrong imo. Chronos is one of these "web-server-service-tool" thingie, but no, it's not cron.
I'm surprised there aren't more things like this, because Cron replacements are really valuable. We wrote a small C program that serves as a scheduling daemon with Redis; we have a keyspace in Redis that can be used to schedule millisecond-granular periodic or one-shot tasks with a flexible "Chronic"-like specification syntax. It is hugely more convenient and usable than cron. Once you have it, you immediately spot l…
So a small bit of Python is enough to perform ephemeral leader election -- for the current minute -- in Zookeeper. Prefixed to otherwise stock invocations a set of machines run the same thing, one of them wins, nobody gets paged.
* * * * * my long and winding command
[becomes]
* * * * * cron-coord somename my long and winding commandNow all that said, I'm not uptodate on that side of things and even less uptodate on open source alternative, though my quick look at this does indicate that it is a start in the right directon and can only get better. So quick look and glance over gave me a good gut feeling, which is always nice to have.
Might be worth checking out if you are building large data flows. We probably run 10k Luigi "tasks" every day, of which the majority is Hadoop jobs. They are all organized in a large dependency graph expressed within Python, and you also get visualization, exception handling, atomic file operation, etc.
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Every time I come across one of these heavyweight, dependency-encrusted "replacements" for basic Unix tools, I'm reminded of L33tStart[0], a fictional, satirical init(1) replacement I wrote about on Reddit -- a sort of parody of systemd. Every day, in a bizarre manifestation of Poe's Law, L33tStart seems less and less a parody. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/14ay0r/hacker_k...
Any chance you could open source L33tStart. Also what type of ponies were you using for your startups? Black or white ponies?
Anyone know why launchd hasn't taken off in this regard? I've used it on my personal systems with success, but rarely (if ever) see it mentioned as a cron replacement. Instead, you frequently see these solutions done from scratch.
Seems like a decent idea. According to Wikipedia, Ubuntu considered it in 2006 when they were looking for a new unit system, but didn't like that it was under Apple's own license, which was shortly thereafter changed to the Apache license.
I'll remember it if I want to do something unconventional on a system.
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My C is terrible, probably far worse than you perceive yours to be. I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you change your mind, advancing years or no. I'm with Sillysaurus, this is a great solution to a common problem. Pawn off the code onto me and I'll publish it under my name if you're that worried about getting bad publicity. :P
I actually feel very good about my C code; C is my native language. I just feel very bad about the Internet. :)