Kellie,
While Cron is a great scheduling tool and in this case would be good for some recurring events like reports ,certain maintainence, backups, it could potentially be used for "un-managing" nodes or devices during recuring windows or maintainence periods that happen on a regular basis (a feature that is sorely needed). On that note some maintainence windows would require multiple crontab like entries to implement. Similar to how Nagios defines timeperiods.
Examples:
Nagios Timeperiods
define timeperiod{
timeperiod_name 247
alias 24 Hours A Day, 7 Days A Week
sunday 00:00-24:00
monday 00:00-24:00
tuesday 00:00-24:00
wednesday 00:00-24:00
thursday 00:00-24:00
friday 00:00-24:00
saturday 00:00-24:00
}
Crontab like schedule would be:
/* 24x7 */
* * * * * <247 calander>
define timeperiod{
timeperiod_name CommSrvrProd
alias Comm Server Production Hours
sunday 00:00-02:55,08:00-24:00
monday 00:00-02:55,06:00-24:00
tuesday 00:00-02:55,06:00-24:00
wednesday 00:00-02:55,06:00-24:00
thursday 00:00-02:55,06:00-24:00
friday 00:00-02:55,06:00-24:00
saturday 00:00-02:55,07:00-24:00
}
Crontab like entry for CommSrvrProd
* 0-3 * * * <everyday midnight to 0300>
* 8-23 * * 0 <Sunday 0800 to midnight>
* 7-23 * * 6 <Saturday 0700 to midnight>
* 6-23 * * 1-5 <Monday - Friday 0600 to midnight>
But while a cron like schedular would be nice, I have taken that idea a bit further in an idea that @BenRichards recently mentioned http://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/2655 where I decscribe a calendaring system in a bit more detail.
Disclaimer...my crontab syntax may be incorrect as it is a bit rusty...