Chris,
We've been using EM for a long time for our jobs but similar to others this is
only for our jobs. Why do we use it?
* I started using it over cron because it allowed me to centralize job
management, along with automatically capturing job logs and execution status.
* As we (slowly) move away from direct access to the oracle
installation account, new security rules don't allow for cron access except for
certain exceptions.
I'm rather paranoid (DBAs are paid to be paranoid) so on each EM server I was
able to obtain special permission to run cron jobs as the oracle installation
user. These exceptions have the sole purpose of making sure nothing freakish
has happened to various components of EM. This covers just a few different
items with some being related to bugs we hit in previous releases that really
hurt.
One thing about NFS with scripts, maybe our hardware vendor isn't managing NFS
mounts correctly but periodically they go stale. When that happens, in our
case the only way to fix the issue is to reboot the affected server. That's
huge when it's a production server yet with the NFS being stale we lost access
to all scripts PLUS a root-owned process (can't remember at the moment) starts
spinning due to the situation. So yes, we're in the process of storing all
scripts locally per server (400 to 500 servers). But with EM12c you can use
provisioning functionality to copy code from one spot to another, which means
you can use it to create a regular job to refresh all scripts from a central
location on your EM to all other servers.
Dave Herring
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Chris Grabowy
Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2015 1:47 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Cron management...
Howdy.
We currently have about 30 Redhat Linux servers running Oracle 11.2
Recently for a short time the crontab entry for a production backup was
commented out.
Just last week one of the DBAs had "accidently" deleted all the backup scripts.
The scripts directory is NFS mounted so it impacted every server.
The Netbackup folks like to do maintenance during the day. Any Oracle backups
that may have been running abort. These days we get notice from the Netbackup
folks but it's kinda tricky to check 30 servers and determine if anything is
running. Or kick off 30+ archive log backup scripts across all the servers to
clean up the archive log directories before the Netbackup maintenance.
Managing crontabs, jobs and scripts across 30 servers just doesn't seem to be
working.
Our company uses a job scheduling app called Tidal. The manager of that app
demo'd the product to me and it seems like it can address many of our
headaches. In theory a single simple interface to manage all the jobs
scheduled across all the database servers.
However one of the issues identified by the Linux admin is that the Tidal agent
needs root access so he is reluctant to install the Tidal agent anywhere but a
couple of designated Tidal servers.
I am wondering if other sites have stopped using crontab? If so then what did
you replace it with?
Anyway, I am open to any thoughts, suggestions, etc.
Thanks,
Chris Grabowy
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