It was REAL tricky.

How to figure out which job is first is not too bad.  Essentially, we have 
them all touch a file pattern, and whichever one touches it first is "in 
charge."  However, since several may start at the exact same second, you 
need to have them sleep a unique time before touching the file.  We use the 
last two digits of the process id times 2.

HOWEVER, how do you figure out which job is LAST?  The ONLY way to do it is 
to use bpdbjobs, and bpdbjobs is not on the client unless its a media 
server.  We cheated and put it there.

As simple as all this may sound, it took weeks of trial and error to get it 
right.  The biggest time loss was the 'jobs start all at once' 
problem.  Before adding the sleep, we couldn't figure out why some would 
work and some would not -- especially on HPs.  Go figure.  Five scripts 
would touch five files, then they would do an ls to see who touched the 
pattern first, and the five scripts would not AGREE!  That's why we had to 
add the sleep.

I don't envy anyone having to go through that.  That's why we offer this 
workaround free for anyone who wants it.

At 06:38 PM 10/18/00 -0500, Andrew Steingruebl wrote:
>A while ago there was a discussion about how to make sure that the 
>bpstart/end
>scripts for a class with multi-streaming were only executed once.  It appears
>that the only good way to do it is to write some sort of checkpoint that
>stores state for each time a start is called, and then only calls the end
>script when the checkpoint decrements to 0.
>
>This doesn't seem extremely difficult to do, but Curtis indicated back in
>November that it was a little tricky, so I'm not sure I'm thinking of all the
>issues.
>
>Anyone want to volunteer the answer?
>
>Thanks.
>
>--
>Andy Steingruebl              | e-mail: steingra AT pprd.abbott DOT com
>Unix Systems Admin/Programmer | phone:  (847) 935-4728
>Unix/Network Security         | fax:    (847) 935-0142
>Abbott Laboratories, PPDR&D   | post:   100 Abbott Park Road, D472 - AP9A
>                               |         Abbott Park, IL 60064-6115
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
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---
W. Curtis Preston, Principal Consultant at Collective Technologies
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