Puppet

I like this idea. The only dangerous bit is that if the ‘random’ fires every time, you end up with your cron jobs wandering all over the place. If that weren’t a problem, a simple random() function would do the job. As it stands, I think it’ll have to be something Cron-specific, which will only generate a new random number if it’s a new job that’s being created. I’m sure that just specifying ‘random’ would be simple to support, but I don’t know if the ranged version would be quite so easy.

Not volunteering, by the way, just commenting… (grin)

How about seeding the RNG with the host ID (not sure if this is the correct terminology, sorry)? That way it would be different for every host but consistent and reproducible on each one.

For some time i have used this method of achieving this and now i use it when setting up cron job with puppet.

cron { "Example_cron":
        command     => 'sleep $((RANDOM\%300)) ; /path/to/command',
        minute      => 20,
        user        => root
}

This example executes “/path/to/command” at a random second between 0-300 seconds (5 mins).

Here’s a simple patch for 0.24.4 that adds a fqdn_rand() function to parser/functions.rb.

The function returns a pseudorandom integer based on the FQDN. The first argument determines the max. The second argument is optional and when used, is added to the seed generated from the fqdn.

Pushed in commit [d54338f8921b4b2973dcde52576d7e9fa58148cb] in branch 0.24.x