yo u k n o W, I Wa s j u s t m I n d I n g my own business, reading my email and stuff, d Av I d n . B l A n K- e d e l MA n when the following message from the SAGE mailing list came on my screen (slightly ex- cerpted but reprinted with permission): From:
[email protected] practical Perl tools: Date: January 9, 2008 2:10:14 PM EST Subject: Re: [SAGE] crontabs vs /etc/ back in timeline cron.[daily,hourly,*] vs /etc/cron.d/ David N. Blank-Edelman is the Director of Technology On a more specific aspect of this (without at the Northeastern University College of Computer regard to best practice), does anyone know and Information Science and the author of the O’Reilly book Perl for System Administration. He has spent the of a tool that converts crontabs into Gantt past 22+ years as a system/network administrator in charts? I’ve always wanted to visualize how large multiplatform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT the crontab jobs (on a set of machines) line Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of the up in time. Each entry would need to be LISA ’05 conference and one of the LISA ’06 Invited Talks co-chairs. supplemented with an estimate of the dura-
[email protected]@ccs.neu.edu tion of the job (3 minutes vs 3 hours). JM I just love sysadmin-related visualization ideas. This also seemed like a fun project with some good discrete parts well-suited to a column.