• (cs) in reply to marty
    marty:
    dailywtf articles alway seem fake.

    Sometimes they do. But then you encounter very similar situations in real life...

    There simply is no limit to the crap idiots are capable of producing.

  • (cs) in reply to Jake Clarson
    Jake Clarson:
    When you are completely and utterly oblivious to the fact that something like Cron even exists, let alone how to use it...

    Yes, but when the tech person even calls it a 'cron job', indicating that they've been given a pointer to a clue, it's just sad.

    Of course, the experience I had along these lines may be even worse, as I specifically told the moron to use 'cron', it was on a Solaris 2.6 box running Apache, so cron was installed as part of the operating system, and things were breaking because the moron had disabled it as unnecessary software. (Specifically, log files weren't rolling, so the system periodically filled up its hard drive - which was partitioned into one partition, ensuring that a full filesystem would result in a crash.) Note that the moron had left 'telnet' active, as he considered it necessary to administer the system - so the amount of security gained by not running cron was too small to measure[1].

    The first we knew of the situation was when it blew up on us - which he used to try and justify his design. At the same time as I was attempting to use it to mandate code reviews. Sadly, he apparently won that round, because our boss was convinced that time not spent writing code was wasted.

    [1] I'd reported the issue to our boss, who instructed me to fix it in the way I'd proposed: install ssh, disable telnet; patch the web CGIs. After I requested access to do this, and got refused, our boss told me, "Well, if it's really a problem, do you actually need to be given access to install this?" I responded, "Not really, but it'd be nice to have authorization in writing first, since it would technically be breaking into the system." So I got my authorization in writing, and broke in and fixed it. So the admin re-enabled telnet by going to the console and logging in - because he couldn't figure out how to use ssh. At that point, I was politically stymied from doing more - I could shut telnet off again, but he'd just turn it back on. The moron made it clear he wasn't budging, by accepting a no raise eval over this, and management refused to fire him.

    I'm glad I'm no longer working there.

  • (cs)

    WTF cron script ... triggered by homepage visit ... hard-reboot cures this... I DONT GET IT

  • Noway Shemightfindout (unregistered)

    Aah. Spouses and computers. My wife once came to me and complained that her new notebook was running really slow and asked me to take a look at it. Now, I'd recently spent a few hours setting everything up on it for her and knew there was nothing wrong with it OS-wise. Turns out she had downloaded each and every add-on offered on the net she could find. Smiley faces, funny emoticons, etc. Everything. It took me 2 hours to clean off all the mallware and spyware that had accumulated. A few weeks later she came to me very exited - a prospective buyer had emailed her offering to buy a property she was selling for more than the marked price. Unfortunately they were in Nigeria and would have some issues transferring the money to her... "Hon. Um. Sit down for a second. I need to explain something to you."

  • Sean (unregistered)

    I've seen systems take this route. There are two phases to getting anything done: doing it and doing it right. Too often I've seen business types just wanting it done, and not willing to spend the time to do it right, so people get pressured into doing things the quickest way possible. Semaphores to prevent multiple executions become fluffy features.

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to tiller
    tiller:
    Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone link a page view (and not just the first, ANY page view) to executing a mass email script?

    I have done that, on shared webhosts without cron installed. What I did was to record the last start time of the 'cron' job and if it was more then 4 Hour, I would update the start time field, and execute the cron job. Worked fine. (And yes it was a hack, and I did put in a comment explaining why the code did what it did).

  • josh (unregistered)

    well put that in your bowl pack and smoke it

  • Usama (unregistered)

    How did he get the apology email when he had forwarded all their emails to trash???

  • Akhilesh (unregistered)

    He he... Have done a similar thing before - Working for a web agency we had to do a one time mail for a customer - for which we wrote a script that read the db, picked up 500 emails and fired. It was getting late, and to try to save time me and a developer decided to run the script from 7 different terminals... You can guess what happened next... The mail was not marked as sent until the script finished running through the 500 names... To try to finish faster, we changed the script to pickup 1000 names and run... Very sheepish grins occured the next morning :/

Leave a comment on “Not Much of a Cron Job”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #265139:

Log Out

« Return to Article