Launching Control Panel Cron Jobs

Along with the cron scripts that Parallels H-Sphere puts into its physical servers' crontabs, there are several background jobs that are executed by Parallels H-Sphere on the Control Panel server:

• Accounting - does recurrent billing for end users
• OverLimitCron - checks that the account is not going over the limit
• ResellerCron - does billing for resellers
• TrialCron - suspends expired trial accounts
• RevenueCron - calculates summary billing info
• ContentMovingCron - completes the process of moving user content
• FailedSignupsCron - sends emails about failed signups (every 5 minutes)
• TTAutocloseCron - closes trouble tickets answered certain time ago
• VPSCron - queries the status of creating virtual servers (every 4 minutes)
• ecCron - processes the external_credits table and adds payments performed within an external payment system outside Parallels H-Sphere to this table as the account credits, thus integrating external payments into Parallels H-Sphere. Read more about external credits configuration in External Credits section of Parallels H-Sphere Developer Guide.

These cron processes use the last_start table in the Parallels H-Sphere database. This table contains the following fields:

name varchar(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
value timestamp,
last_user int8

When Parallels H-Sphere is restarted, the values are read from this table for each cron:

• name - CP cron job name as in the list above (corresponds to the cron tag's name attribute in cron XML configuration file)
• value - last time that cron was executed
• last_user - user_id of the last user that was calculated with the cron (used only for accounting and overlimit).

CP Cron XML Configuration Files

CP cron settings are defined and customized in the corresponding XML configuration file described in CP Cron Configuration section of Parallels H-Sphere Developer Guide. You can add new custom CP crons according to the instructions from Adding Custom CP Cron Jobs of Parallels H-Sphere Developer Guide and/or change cron job settings such as priority, starting time and period. Such customization can also be done by means of Parallels H-Sphere packages (see Building Packages section of Parallels H-Sphere Developer Guide).

Background Job Manager

Background Job Manager is a utility that allows you to enable, start and disable selected cron jobs from the CP interface. Cron jobs are available from the Admin control panel, the Background Job System section.