Ludo Sketches

OpenDS 2.0 has just been released and there are several new and exciting features on it.

Today we will focus on one simple feature that greatly reduce cost of administration: scheduled tasks.

Being a Directory Server administrator often implies that you have to perform some administrative tasks on a regular basis. One of those tasks for example that an administrator has to do is a backup of the database. With most Directory Servers, the administrator would write a script to be run on a specific time of the day (or rather the night) that would proceed with the backup.

With OpenDS and the Recurrent Tasks, we’ve simplified this to the extreme: Just instruct OpenDS to do a backup on a weekly or daily basis, and as long as the server is running, it will execute the backup procedure at the desired time.

Here’s how to schedule an hourly, compressed backup for the main back-end :

$ bin/backup -p 5444 -D cn=directory\ manager -w secret12 -n userRoot \
-d ./backups -c –recurringTask ‘0 * * * *’

Recurring Backup task BackupTask-dc89d98e-4ade-410e-ad19-325279af8f67

scheduled successfully

Now, just wait for the hour to pass, and check if the backup has been taken 😉

The string passed as a parameter following the –recurringTask option has the same format as for the crontab(5) time/date: a 5 integer pattern field, separated by blank spaces: Minute (0-59), Hour (0-23), Day Of Month (1-31) Month Of Year (1-12) Day Of The Week (0-6 with 0 being Sunday).

The recurrent tasks are not limited to backups. They can be applied to all tasks, although some may not be that useful to everyone. Although I do see some use of a daily import of an LDIF file from a well know location, as a way to synchronize with external sources.

And of course, you can list the scheduled and recurrent tasks with dsconfig and cancel them if needed.

In the next release of OpenDS, you will be able to configure the recurrent tasks with the Control Panel. If you can’t wait, you can try with the latest daily build.

You can find more information on recurrent tasks on the OpenDS Documentation Wiki.

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