scheduling tasks

[v1ctory]

hello!
i have a small cluster of 25 linux computers in office. i have to run some tasks on it everyday (different tasks each day); so i have to remotely ssh into each of those machines and run them; which is quite a hassle. what do you guys suggest? how can i schedule this task of patches and system checks? have you guys suffered the same?

 

[macdude425]

Probably cron or anacron would be your best choices.

Here's a nice little tutorial on it from RH, even though it should apply to any modern Linux distro with coreutils.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/custom-guide/ch-autotasks.html

 

[horndude]

and if you dont want to use cron you can also schedule one time tasks with the "at" command

 

[v1ctory]

thanks for the pointers!
i was aware of cron and at for managing tasks, and i had used it initially. however, the trouble was that i was never able to find out if task was successfully completed on all the machines. some machines might be switched off, or the task might get interrupted for some reason or the other.
that was creating an uncertainity which was not acceptable. that is why i switched to manual execution of tasks.

 

[The General]

Wow thanks for the tip horndude, I didn't know about the "at" command. This is quite helpful