At one point, I thought Anycast might help, but then it's not going to suit the purpose of getting a copy to every URL when every host is available.

On the EEM front, can EEM 2.1 (or a later version) handle the following?

# cron every n hours

event timer cron cron-entry "@hourly"

event timer cron cron-entry "everyhour"

event timer cron cron-entry "0 */6 * * *"

event timer cron cron-entry "0 0,6,12,18 * * *"

# dynamically grab the "hostname" of whichever IOS device the applet is running on. I'm not sure "routername" is a predefined var because there's only one reference to it on cisco.com.

action 1.0 info type routername

...

action 3.0 syslog msg "$eem_applet_name execution on $_info_routername"

Are there similar built-in variables 1) to print a timestamp, and 2) to let the applet refer to itself (its own name)?

First, EEM's cron is Vixie cron (i.e. the same one used by BSD operating systems). So the same syntax (e.g. @hourly) does work. In fact, all but the "everyhour" syntax should work.

No, there is no variable to refer to the policy itself. You can, however, use $_event_type_string to get the name of the event. If the ED used is a timer ED, then you also have $_timer_time as well as $_event_pub_time, $_event_pub_sec, and on newer versions of EEM $_event_pub_msec.

I thought I came across a reference to "cron-entry * everyweek * * *" in the context of EEM on cisco.com somewhere, but I can't find it right now. The other three should more than suffice.

"info type routername" appears to be a valid predefined EEM env var, but I cannot determine from the scant few hits on cisco.com which version of EEM it's available in. There's hints that it's not valid for EEM 2.1.