Probably a daft question, but why can you not use
cron? It seems an odd enforcement. If you are writing the code, then you probably have access to do all sorts of nasty stuff anyway. I would not think that a scheduled job is necessarily any more dangerous. The schedules would need to be preserved or shared if you have clustered servers or you migrate to a new server. There may be restrictions that are in place to avoid
everybody scheduling loads of things and clogging the machine up and there needs to be some control. Assuming that this job that will do a thing in general rather than for you personally, then maybe a service account would be more suitable (a non-personal account that you/team can
sudo to) which could be given access to use
cron.
Is there a good reason for the rule? Personally I have not restricted anyone because of one from these:
- They cannot get to the command line (business users)
- They know what they are doing (application developers or support staff)
- If they get it wrong, it's only what they could do anyway.......
It's important that jobs run as a person don't become critical to production running, I agree, but that's a cultural thing too. I've had much experience where a savy person has set something up themselves and then they get their PC replaced and it's all lost or credentials to a database change or are restricted and suddenly their entirely unsupported report stops working. It's worse when they leave and nobody knows wheat was done, what it did or anything except "Bob used to do something each month"
Can you say why you are not permitted to use a scheduler? Anything else is either a bad solution calling
at repeatedly (probably also restricted) or requires you to have code running all the time all over the place which is exposed to failure and is unlikely to get restarted on boot until you restart it.
Thanks, in advance,
Robin
