Linux – cron jobs with the same execution time

Cron can run many scripts at the same time. In fact, in Debian there are entire directories of cron scripts (ie. /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.hourly) that execute at the same time.

If the script executes properly at a different time, why don't you try changing the time of the root cron job to determine whether the problem is with the actual timing, or a conflict between the scripts.

I also agree with turning off the redirect to /dev/null until you have everything working correctly.

I think heartbeat / pacemaker would be the best solution, since they can take care a lot of a lot of race conditions, fencing, etc for you in order to ensure the job only runs on one host at a time. It's possible to design something yourself, but it likely won't account for all the scenarios those packages do, and you'll eventually end up replacing most of, if not all, of the wheel.

If you don't really care about such things and you want a simpler setup. I suggest staggering the cron jobs on the servers by a few minutes. Then when the job starts on the primary it can somehow leave a marker on whatever shared resource the jobs operate on (you don't specify this, so I'm being intentionally vague). If it's a database, they can update a field in a table or if it's on a shared filesystem lock a file.

When the job runs on the second server, it can check for the presence of the marker and abort if it is there.