Running the Kontrollcomm script on a schedule

Sometimes you will have a server and template that contains commands that you want to run at certain intervals during the day, week, or month. In this case it's important to schedule the script to run via crontab - the scheduler used in Unix and Linux systems.

Setting up the script user and crontab schedule

We can run the scripts as the root user (bad idea) or as a dedicated user. Let's name the user "kontrollcomm" for consistency.

ROOT-(0)> useradd -m kontrollcomm ROOT-(0)> passwd kontrollcomm Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully

We then need to put the agent file into a directory - in this case "/usr/local/bin" and make the script executable by the user.

cp kontrollcomm_agent.py /usr/local/bin/ chown kontrollcomm:kontrollcomm /usr/local/bin/kontrollcomm_agent.py chmod 0700 /usr/local/bin/kontrollcomm_agent.py

Then we'll put the correct entries in the /etc/crontab file - you can also use the user's crontab if you want. I like the system crontab because it's eaier to see all of the jobs in one file than in multiple user's files.

Here are my /etc/crontab entries.

ROOT-(0)> cat /etc/crontab SHELL=/bin/bash PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=root HOME=/ # # run-parts 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly 02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily 22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly 42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly # #Kontrollbase client server polling script */5 * * * * kontrollcomm /usr/local/bin/kontroll_agent.py > /dev/null 2>&1

Notice that we are running the script as the user "kontrollcomm". You will want to change that if you decided to call the user something else, or if you are running them as root (not recommended).

There you see that the script runs every 5 minutes - so we're downloading the template and running the report every 5 minutes. If you like, you can change this to any interval you choose.