I dont quite get clearly what it is that you are looking to achieve here, but rather than cron - have you considered a more adept job scheduling / orchestrating tool ? there are some very nicely done open source ones out there.
I have a filesystem that mounts only on the active node of an n-way rhcs based active/passive cluster. I want a scheduling system that can store its conf on the shared fs and be started by the cluster service.
I have an interim solution while I research, do you have any personal reco's for job scheduling daemons?
Thanks! jlc