Sharing Jobs on a Network

Oddjob is the network.

• Introduction
• Working With Remote Jobs
• Remote Scheduling
• Connecting Multiple Servers
• Further Information

Introduction

Sharing jobs allows them to be controlled and monitored by another Oddjob user or Oddjob process such as a scheduler.

A special server job is used to provide the sharing functionality. The server accepts connections from Oddjobs on other machines and provides information about the local configuration and accepts instructions such as to run and stop jobs.

To connect to a shared Oddjob a client job is required. This job connects to the server and reflects the remote jobs locally.

Working With Remote Jobs

Working with the local reflection of a remote job is no different to working with a local job except that the action takes place on the server.

• When you run the local job, the real job runs on the server.
• When you stop the local job, the job stops on the server.
• When you set a property on the local job, the value is sent across the network to the job on the server.
• When you schedule the local job, It's the job on the server that gets scheduled.

When using Oddjob Explorer working with server processes is a virtually seamless transition from working with local jobs.

Accessing a remote job and it's properties from a configuration file is a virtually seamless transition from working with a nested Oddjob job. A job is accessible using the notation ${client-id/id-of-job-on-server}.

Connecting Multiple Servers

Clients and Servers can be linked together to enable jobs to be visible across several servers:

client1 -> server1 -> client2 -> server2

In this configuration connecting to client1 allows access to job on server 1 and on server2. Connecting to client2 only allows access to jobs on server2.

The server has built in loop back detection to detect the situation when a client loops back to the originating server.

server1  server2
   |   \/   |
   |   /\   |
client1  client2

In this configuration connecting to either client allows both servers to be monitored.

Further Information

Behind the scenes Oddjob uses JMX (Java Management Extensions) For more information please see the Sun documentation