Machine reboots.. Max 14 at a time

(imported topic written by jcsUTSW)

I’ve got a group of 500 or so machines that I need to have reboot nightly. Problem is I need a max of 14 to take action at a time…

I’ve got an app server that these things check with on reboot and it can only handle 14 connections at a time (stupid I know, but what can you do)

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

(imported comment written by NoahSalzman)

You could use a single action but with an Action Script that paused a variable length based on some retrieved property of the machines. That is, if you went to the trouble of splitting the 500 machines into 50 groups, then you could have the Action Script pause “X seconds times the group number” so that only 10 machines at a time were rebooting.

restart {60*my_group_number}

This approach doesn’t scale to thousands of machines, but if you only have to write the retrieved property once then dealing with 500 machines it isn’t so bad.

(imported comment written by BenKus)

You can use the “temporal distribution” feature…

So:

  • Schedule the restart to start at midnight to 6am reoccuring daily.
  • Normally you would get all 500 restarting within a few minutes of 12:00am, but you can add temporal distribution of 60 minutes.
  • When you do this, each client will pick a random time and wait between 1-60 minutes each night when they find the action is relevant (for most clients right around midnight).
  • So if you use a 60 minute temporal distribution, then on average you would get somewhere around 10 computers every minute restarting… use 100 minutes and you would get 5 computers a minute on average…

This seems to me like it will work quite well.

Ben

(imported comment written by dawilsonvette91)

How do access the “Temporal distribution” feature?

(imported comment written by BenKus)

It is an option in the “Take Action Dialog” when you take any action.

Ben

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

How would I do this to several hundred machines on a nightly bases?

We deployed the Fixlet “Restart Needed†but this restarts a workstation once. It then returns a “Completed†and the workstation is no longer relevant causing it not to restart the next night.

I was originally thinking that by changing the Success Criteria to something obscured would force the workstation to be relevant the next day. However, this would also make the workstation reboot several time within the time span we have selected.

Thanks

-MJ

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Do you want the restart to occur even if the computer isn’t “pending restart”? If so, you can make a copy of the restart needed Fixlet and change the relevance to “true”.

Ben