disable cron/at for application upgrades

[Lonny Balderston]

Greetings. For HP-UX 11.11 systems, we wish to disable cron/at during application upgrades. Is there a simple way to do this? (/sbin/init.d/cron stop/start? cron handles at as well?) If so, will doing so result in any problems? Thank you.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Doing a '/sbin/init.d/cron stop' will stop ALL cron / at jobs from running.

Problems -- That depends on the jobs that are scheduled to run during your outage.

[Pete Randall]

You could put a temporary cron.allow and at.allow in place, with one fictitious user name in them. That would effectively deny everyone else from running at or cron.


Pete

[Jeff_Traigle]

cron manages both the crontab and at jobs so stopping cron as you indicated is all you need to disable both. The only problems would result from any jobs that are scheduled that might normally run when you're going to perform the application upgrade because they won't be run when cron starts again. (Well... the at jobs might... I don't recall offhand since I haven't used it that much over the years, but the man page should tell you.) You just need to be sure that any such jobs aren't critical to run at that specific time and identify any that may need to be run after the application upgrade is completed.