• Ron Fox (google)

    Yet another guy who makes the first change by not fixing the problem. That's the RWTF

  • Charleh (unregistered)

    This article annoys me (as do most on this site), mostly because they could have just switched to a windows task which would have fixed it for good. Task scheduler can be a pain to get working but once it's working you shouldn't have any issues (a lot of standard system stuff runs off it)

  • Greg (unregistered)

    So that thing has been running for years and this year is the first year they run into problems because of daylight saving time? Do they usually only use the system half of the year?

  • ratchetfreak (unregistered)

    Or they could just switch the timezone to one without DST...

    It's not user-facing so just setting UTC to be used will fix it.

  • D (unregistered) in reply to Greg

    It's almost certainly not the first time they ran into problems - the first time that someone complained loudly enough to get them looked at. Afterall, it just means it's a bit slow running once or twice a year... hardly critical.

  • Vietcongster (unregistered)

    TRWTF is not solving the problem. TRRWTF is not being able to work with Task Scheduler. TRRRWTF is the submission itself, since it is almost a confession (without the "Confession" in the title).

  • Bert (unregistered)

    The default Windows [task scheduler was terrible] [TODO finish this post]

    Also what are ERP and EDI? Yes, Google is 2 seconds away but upon encountering these terms I'm in the middle of reading an article ensconsed in an industry saturated with TLAs, and my attention is already volatile.

  • Phlip (unregistered) in reply to Greg

    Where are you getting the impression this had been running for years? It says right in the article that the original "start date" was in September 2015... this was the first daylight-savings time change the program had gone through.

    And I can totally understand the impulse to do the smallest possible change to get it back up and running... when you're working with a badly-written pile of garbage, who knows what else might break if you do something too invasive. It's a house of cards, don't fix what isn't broken, or the whole thing might collapse under you.

    The right answer is definitely to actually fix everything properly, but that's not always feasible, the second-best option is often to make the minimal change and get out, with "make a proper refactor-ey fix for this, and leave the rest unchanged" often is worse, because who knows how many unexpected highly-coupled functions and undocumented dependencies you'll miss when doing the refactor.

    On another note, in regards to: "He didn’t want to know what would happen if the scheduled task were set to run every –45 minutes." It depends on the language, obviously, but I can say from my own experience with a scheduler that behaved badly with DST changes, that if the language just passes the time to the Win32 Sleep function, it's going to get cast as a DWORD, and end up sleeping for 2^32 seconds, minus 45 minutes. You might be waiting for a while for your upload to finish.

  • Martin (unregistered)

    Everyone should do similar "measures" to SECURE HIS JOB!

    No real fixes, but his own (NOT SHARED) calendar, full of similar notifications. Do this, do that.

    Try to fire similar irreplaceable individual! Everything crashes at least next day :)

  • lordofduct (unregistered)

    Would have been a nice WTF edition to include the fact that Windows 7 Home can't be connected to using Windows remote desktop, and Chris had to wrestle with putting some shit on it like logmein or something.

  • Greg (unregistered) in reply to Phlip

    My mistake indeed :-(

    Assumption is the mother of a shitload of screwups... I just now realised the date format used in the article is MM-DD-YYYY (a wtf in itself)

  • BlatentTruth (unregistered)

    TDWTF is daylight savings time.

  • SomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to Bert

    I happen to know both as I worked as the EDI specialist at my last job, but I was expecting some sort of explanation anyway. I never just assumed people know what EDI is (and may god have mercy on the souls of those who do).

  • (nodebb) in reply to BlatentTruth

    "TDWTF is daylight savings time."

    Hate them since they've been shoved down our throats by some Europe-friendly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spittle licking politicians.

    Not quite TDWTF, just OOTRWTFS.

  • Angela Anuszewski (google) in reply to SomeGuy

    The TRRRRWTF is Eric Gern's writing skills.

    SomeGuy - I have no idea what EDI is. I live in embedded C++-land making non-enterprisey widgets. Not all the readers have the same background. The thing is, I can understand the WTF of using an underpowered computer to be a server regardless of the setting. Why introduce jargon to the article that doesn't really need to be there?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Angela Anuszewski

    EDI: Electronic Data Interchange ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning, or Erotic RP if you're into that shit.

  • John (unregistered)

    Doesn't the time change take place early Sunday morning ? How did the time offset stay active during working hours.

  • bob (unregistered)

    can confirm - i was part of an initiative to install ntp clients on all the servers in a hospital. (because standardizing on correct time is standard and correct!) on friday afternoon. without consulting the service owners.

    the accounting server blew a gaskey because time went backwards... many hours of agitation and serious weekend effort and hard liquor in compensation were involved.

  • rdp into 7 home (unregistered)

    TRWTF is RDPing into Win 7 Home. Home does not have RDP Server, only "call for assistance".

  • DigitalDan (unregistered)

    Minimum response should be to begin purchase process for a reasonable server (or cloud service), re-estimate the required time for an upload to determine the maximum task load, etc., etc. None of this would require actual recoding, which is of course desperately needed. Sigh.

  • Mistakes in an article about mistakes (unregistered)

    Windows Home does not allow Remote Desktop. I expected the link about the Windows Task Scheduler to point to something to back up the contention that it was "terrible". Instead, it points to the (very complete) documentation about Task Scheduler.

  • Broken Record (unregistered) in reply to Mistakes in an article about mistakes

    Erik is, again, TRWTF of course.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    The real fun with Windows Task Scheduler is when it loses your event and upon running the task scheduler frontend it pops up a window about not finding "event {xxxxxxxx-xx-xxx-xxxx}", requiring edits of the registry to finally clear up.

  • Gare (unregistered) in reply to SomeGuy

    Thank you. My soul feels blessed. EDI for about 17 years now, in various flavours.

    Gare.Chicago

  • lynn (unregistered)

    Admin, if not okay please remove!

    Our facebook group “selfless” is spending this month spreading awareness on prostate cancer & research with a custom t-shirt design. Purchase proceeds will go to cancer.org, as listed on the shirt and shirt design.

    www.teespring.com/prostate-cancer-research

    Thanks

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to lynn

    prostate cancer

    Please remove!

  • Jake Horn (unregistered)

    TRWTF is who would have allowed any consultant to put anything on a repurposed low end server in Production? You walk them out the door when they mention it.

  • Olivier (unregistered) in reply to bob

    But who would install a server and not configure NTP immediately? It's part of the easy task that have to be done when poping up a new machine, like setting a root password.

  • Adrian (unregistered)

    How does DST effect a scheduler's time period??? it should be now (or last run time) + WaitTime DST doesn't (Shouldn't) even come into it, except for maybe the first run after the DST change.

  • löchlein deluxe (unregistered) in reply to Bert

    "TLA" stands for Too Lazy A***oles, right? Parses ok to me. :D

  • AstorLights (google)

    This article story somehow lacks the inventive stupidity. Something is suddenly a hour off - what on earth could be causing it ? DST. Meh.

  • (nodebb)

    John, Adrian:

    Doesn't the time change take place early Sunday morning ? How did the time offset stay active during working hours.

    How does DST effect a scheduler's time period??? it should be now (or last run time) + WaitTime DST doesn't (Shouldn't) even come into it, except for maybe the first run after the DST change.

    Probably being inconsistent with time zones - for instance getting the current time in a fixed time zone with DST, and scheduling the task in the default (current) time zone. Works fine during DST, adds an hour once DST ends.

    But anyone who saw 15 minutes change to 1 hour 15 minutes and didn't immediately think "DST" is TRWTF. That was my immediate thought and we don't even do DST where I live.

  • (nodebb) in reply to bob

    I like the typo; a synonym for "go-faster button".

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mistakes in an article about mistakes

    Well, just because the badge on the front of the PC said "Windows 7 Home" it does not mean that that is what was running - it could have been upgraded to some other strain of Win7 (indeed, the PC sitting behind me right now claims "Windows 7" on its badge when it's actually running 10).

    As for the TechNet article, those user comments that aren't spam or someone headbutting the keyboard seem to talk a fair bit about exporting the XML generated by the Task Scheduler so that it can be hand-edited into something that works.

  • myname (unregistered) in reply to Watson

    heck, the comp^H^H^H^Hthinkpad I'm reading this on boasts that it's running Win7 too. It's actually running Ubuntu 14.04.

  • Chris M (unregistered) in reply to Adrian

    Exactly. It shouldn't, but the freeware the Highly Paid Consultants installed got it wrong. What can I say? If I had source code for it, I would have fixed it.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Adrian

    Easy! I'm on Eastern Time, which normally is UTC-5, but when DST is in play I'm on UTC-4. It's 11:07AM, so that means it's 15:07UTC as I write this. I need to schedule a job to run in 15 minutes, so I schedule it to run at 15:22UTC. Cool. The job will run at 14:22UTC or 11:22EDT. But, let's say I don't account for DST. Then, my 11:07EDT becomes 16:07UTC, and I I schedule a job to run at 16:22UTC - exactly 1 hour later than it should be.

    TRWTF is either nobody updated the time zones (Win7 came out before DST was extended in the US), which means no updates, probably, or whoever set it up didn't set the clock to sync with an NTP server and change the zone automatically.

  • Rubbish (unregistered)

    Windows 7 Home does not have an RDP server. No way he could have logged in to it.

  • (nodebb)

    Remember, you can't have DERP without ERP!

  • Randal L. Schwartz (github)

    We really really really need to get rid of DST. Here's a great elaboration on why: http://codeofmatt.com/2016/04/23/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-changes/

  • Techpaul (unregistered)

    Love the fact that the Simpsons have become a verb as in

    "was marged Urgent"

  • I dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (unregistered) in reply to Bananafish

    NTP doesn't provide DST status, because DST dates are not consistent around the planet. (WWVB, however, does include a DST flag, because it's only intended for use in the USA.)

  • v (unregistered)

    So, no mass effect comments? I am disappoint.

  • Dieter H. (unregistered) in reply to v

    I'd been thinking about that the whole time.

  • Axel (unregistered)

    Quick! Someone else mention that Windows 7 Home doesn't support remote desktop! We may have missed it the first 8 times.

    You know, you don't have to read every comment to see if yours might be redundant. Just do a find in page for a keyword, like "remote." If someone else has already pointed it out, then don't bother. How hard is that?

Leave a comment on “The EDI Fall Back”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article