Global Scheduling Utility (uconf-schedule)

Overview
Urchin 4 ships with a number of utilities that allow administrators to manage Urchin 4 without need to use the web-based Urchin 4 administrative control panel. These tools are extremely useful in an environment where the use of a GUI for administration is impractical, such as large shared hosting operations providing thousands of Urchin 4 reports to customers.

This article describes the usage of the Global Scheduler, one of the utilities that is typically used in an automated/scripted environment. For a synopsis of the entire suite of scripting utilities and an in-depth description of their usage, please see the Knowledgebase article on http://help.urchin.com titled Importing, Exporting and Scripting the Configuration.

The Global Scheduler utility, called uconf-schedule, is located in the util directory of the Urchin 4 distribution. The types of scheduling operations that uconf-schedule can perform are:

schedule all profiles to run immediately

schedule all profiles to run at a particular time and/or frequency

disable scheduling for all profiles

Usage of the utility is as follows:

uconf-schedule [-k] [-r]

In the default mode, uconf-schedule will interactively prompt for the type of global scheduling operation to apply, and any other parameters necessary (such as the time of day, date, etc.). If the "-k" option is supplied, the scheduling is done without modifying the existing schedule for the profiles. If the "-r" option is specified, the utility will simply schedule all profiles to run immediately, with no further input required. Running "uconf-schedule -k -r" is a useful way of scheduling all profiles to run immediately without changing the normally scheduled run times for the Profiles.

Considerations

The uconf-schedule utility does not actually run jobs itself. It merely applies a global scheduling change to all profiles, which in turn is picked up by the Urchin Scheduler (urchind). Therefore, it is necessary to be running the Urchin Scheduler in order for events scheduled by uconf-schedule to be invoked, including Run-Now events.