Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

* * * * * - Five star cron job. Will run again.

Our app server still restarts via cron job every night at 22:30, it’s been 3 years :)

So Someone in my team decided to create a cron job that auto send email to the client that says "GO FUCK YOURSELF" in clients' Hostinger (shared hosting) account .

My friend , why?

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

So I looked at our dashboard and noticed a banner mentioning scheduled maintenance set for 7:00 AM. And I thought to myself, "I never released an update, and even if I had, the maintenance would be performed 15 minutes after the build finished, not at 7:00 AM." So I emailed my coworkers, asking if they had put up the banner, no, no. I started pulling my hair out trying to figure out what caused this banner to be created. Was there some old job that was just now running? I combed through the server logs, thousands of entries later, and I found the banner was installed by some user with the IP 172.18.0.1...which was the local machine. I went through all the users on the system, running atq to see if anyone had jobs scheduled. And there was one job scheduled, under the root user. At that moment, I legit thought to myself, "have we been hacked? How is that possible?" It's wasn't! Then I looked under /var/spool/atjobs to see what the job actually was. And then I saw it. My weekly updater cron job had installed updates and had scheduled a maintenance window to reboot the system. And I smiled, realizing that my code was now sentient.

mysql server crashes every 18 days, no oom, no crash logs, no sigkill being sent (used auditd). so I figure it's a unknown corner case bug in mysql. now I use a cron job to restart the damn thing every week at 3am, not a problem anymore

I can't figure out what's worst in the new system we got handed over from a client:
1. that they have an every-minute-cron-job with "sudo chmod -R /var 777"
2. that the backup of their database haven't worked since 2014 because the S3 bucket is full
3. It's written in PHP, by one guy, who didn't knew PHP when he started work on it. (All MYSQL calls are String-concats, etc)

Official Release of Wikipedia Bot is Here

How to Use: @wiki <Query>

Runs on cron job, every minute.

If there is literally no Wikipedia page for query, still gets a relevant result.

Demo in Comments.

My coworker doesn't know how to use a terminal. He talked himself into his position and instead of taking the time to learn about the basic commands he keeps asking someone else (including the teammanager, who's actually a software engineer) to do things for him.
For reference; we need the terminal to tail log files, keep track of processes, cron jobs, manipulate file structures, use scp (I use sshfs) to move things between other workstations and servers etc. Being able to use a terminal is one of the basic requirements for our job.

What.
Why.
How.

Why do people do this?

Set up a mail server for our office using one of those all-in-one mail server installations. It would keep denying connections every few days, so me, being the inexperienced shit I was, setup a cron job to restart the server at midnight everyday. It worked and still, to this day, it still works.

Fuck this
I get to work with API where you CAN authenticate with username/password and get a token

But you CAN'T get user info from token (auth response contains ONLY token)

So what I have to do:

1. Get token

2. Request ALL FUCKING USERS and load them into my DB

3. Search through local DB by username and, yeah, here I go

Now I need to have a cron job to update user DB 1/2 times per day

I can't think of ANY reason not to allow this

So i was bitching about some cron task few days before

and guess the issue

Fucking Client just shut down the server by himself for night and cron job scheduled for night time :(

I fucking waste 2-3 days to debug the function whats wrong with them until one day I checked server is closed at night :(

Quite happy with myself, I just made a 60 line backup script that takes in a super simple JSON file and backs up your files in multiple formats. Attached to a cron job and boom. 60 line home baked backup solution

Hi! I'm new in freelancing. I've created a program that scrapes data from a website, parses it, runs DB queries, and emails the prepared data to the customer for whom I've created this program. The whole program is written in PHP and uses a MySQL table. There's almost no front-end, it's just like an automated background process that runs with a cron job. I've bought and set up a domain and hosting for them (my cutomer paid it all). I got the core part of the program running after ~2 days, and it took me ~a week to complete the project including adding features and the testing phase. Now, I'd like to know, how much does this kind of project cost? The business operates in Silicon Valley.

I recently started using Linux on my desktop.

I just love how when I see some minor thing I don't like about the operating system I can just change it myself!

Want to remove the menu icon? Simple change to the settings. Want your downloads folder to be clean? Simple cron job which asks you if you want to clean your downloads folder every day.

Man I love having the freedom to screw up my operating system!

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

I made a bash script for my website that anonymises the visitor IPs in the Awstats logs by replacing the last octet with 0. It can either process all logfiles except the one of the current month, or only the one of the previous month. The latter mode is how I put it in a cron job to be called on the first day of each month.

Everything worked flawlessly with test data, but on the server, some visitor IPs were not anonymised. I noticed that all of them were from the last day of the previous month. Looking at the time stamp of the logfile, it was indeed from the first of the current month, but not from 00:21 where my cron job runs - instead, it was modified around 14:30.

Then I realised that the Awstats engine seems to be configured to batch add the log entries once per day at 14:30 so that when my cron job ran, the visitor data from between 14:30 and 00:00 were not yet in the file!

Solution: batch process all previous logfiles once to clean them up, and schedule the cron job on the 2nd of each month at 00:21.

I fucked up. I used the shebang line #!/usr/bin/env python3 in a script that was being ran every 5 minutes with a cron job. This generated an email to a system that dropped a file for processing and sent an age email for each file every minute. Because the Linux OS generated emails didn’t contain a keyword the script closed by design but I forgot to uncomment the delete temp file line. This started on Wednesday before a 4 day weekend. By the time I got in on Monday I was 40GB over my email quota and receiving 2500 emails a minute. I fixed the script and stopped the emails but down I have to clear out those emails. Here it is Wednesday and I am deleting 1 MB every 3 seconds. This is painful.

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

When your Alma Mater wishes you on your birthday.

My name is not Ajay Reddy and it's not my birthday

Found out today that someone has a cron job running doing a daily DB export since June 1 of 2015. The dumps average 2GB. I am amazed that storage engineering hasn't complained. Here's the kicker. It's a Dev database. WTF!? Dev? I freed up a terabyte of space today. Now I need to find out who owns that cron job.

Please, share your website backup strategies and practices - I have a simple php/mysql webapp and files don't actually have any backup other than the fact that they're also saved in a dropbox, and for DB I have a cron job that will export it daily and send it to my email.

How do you do it? How large are sites/app that you're backing up?

Work has been inefficiently using multiple cron jobs to run php scripts to generate pre-baked data.

The last two days I took the steps needed to internalize all those scripts and run them from an individual php controller which is ran from Jenkins. My script keeps track of scheduling and error tracking.

I'd say I'm pretty proud of what I came up with.

a Senior co-worker start cron job using cpanel to fetch tweets every minute .
the problem he didn't use/know
'/dev/null'
which send email to the admin for every successful fetch
after a week we discovered this problem , admin inbox full of emails ,also our server get blacklisted (ie. cannot send emails)

Sometimes there's no way to get someone to understand. Sometimes it's better to just build a cron job that will compensate for this asinine mistakes.

New Year's day 10am I got a text message from the product owner.

To wish me a happy new year one would guess. But no! She was telling me that the cron job that I developed 2 years ago failed and I need to apply the change on the configuration manually.

What really irritated me was that was no matter of life and death, this could wait for us to get back at the office. Or even worse, she could have done the change herself, after all she was checking emails anyway.

What a b.

Deleted the database of an application I built for college since they were replacing it with a better one. Later, the teacher remembered that he didn't take a backup.

Fortunately, I remembered I had configured a cron job an year back in the app which saved me that day. 😅

when the git push doesn't work since the first one

(cron job, not able to access and fix the script as i'm not on-site and won't be for a while)

Never plan every day CRON job between 2 AM and 3 AM.

Imagine filling 50 files full of garbage unreadable code to build what is essentially a cron job microservice...

Oh we have a console program
then a module to pull in all the services
then a manager to manage the actual jobs
then if they fail it all cascades back up

My god, this isn't NASA.

The amount of overengineering I have seen in the past few hours is insane.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!!!

So I was instructed today, after lunch, to spend an hour teaching a member of my team how to SSH, store keys, basic io routines, and create CRON jobs to auth our ECR registry by my team lead.. Why am I wasting dev time teaching someone how to use an operating system? Need I add, our primary Dev workspace is a spun up using vagrant using xubuntu. I just can't comprehend how this person has been using xubuntu as their primary OS for two months and doesn't know the SSH protocol. Much less how they landed a dev job without any prior experience with a *NIX based OS.

Have any of you guys had a PHP cronjob fail on you at any point? Any good story to go with it?

Testing your cron job. Waiting for the minutes to tick down...

I hate cron jobs. Hours of googling and double checking. My job is perfect. Still doesn't run according to the logs

I should run a daily cron job for my Mac rants. Today it was just this: I connected to some other iMac over network discovery, but from within in the GUI it is impossible for me to get the IP or any information of that machine. All information it displays you see below. Thanks very helpful. (Only lastly I found the information by pinging administrators-iMac.local)

i need an adult. I know noone who would understand my worries, so you guys need to be it.

i have a nextcloud running on my raspberry pi. performance is horrible, dont ask, but it works.

i mostly use it to backup the photos of my phone sd card every night when my phone charges. Internally this works good. If i am elseplace it wont for obvious reasons.

In my youthful joy of doom i opened port 443 and forward it to my raspi. I get internet via cable and my ip is pretty much static (it was the same for 10 months). So external access is provided.

Now i thought, its stupid that i cannot sign an ssl certificate cause i dont have a domain. Lets buy domain. But before i do that i did some try runs with duckdns to test the principle.

Some back and forth, it works now. Pretty god, i could even make a cron job on the raspbi to renew (that should work right?). Only problem. randoname.duckdns.org doesnt work internally. Or should not at least.

So i googled a bit and it turns out that my router (a cable fritz!box i bought myself) can be a local network dns. Or cannot. Regardless what i try, it doesnt accept the changed config file.

Now the problem.

It works anyway. randoname.duckdns.org points to my external "static" ip and resolves to that from my internal network..so it works on my phone or laptop. if i traceroute the thing it goes via two hops out and finishes in less than 1ms.

Now to the problem:
I have no fokkin clue why. The expected behaviour would be that it shouldnt work. If i do what i intended todo on pc in the hosts file tracert works correctly, directly pointing to the internal ip.

What i cannot figure out, is it the fritz!box being smart? Is it my ISP being smart?

Reason to rant: i have absolutly NOONE to ask, i know not a single person who would even understand what troubles me. I want to learn, i want to know WHY not just some mindless russian patchwork of "if it works its good enough".

thats depressing.

Already languishing custom software project on a test system automatically emails hundreds of expired users asking them to renew via the test system because I wasn't paying attention to the fact that a developer had added a cron job? Sure. Bring on the suck. Because I have nothing better to do than clean up after myself and my lack of attention to detail.

Always valued my every minute but seems I have given up the principle for a cron job which I have to wait for every minute to run so I can see what I am doing on the log file.

I had a colleague, who built a bunch of smaller systems for the company I'm working in. He didn't want to waste his time building a "perfect" system (which I generally agree with, the question is just where to draw the line).

But because it took him so long to build the prototype, usually it went into production without being hardened (like basic input validations were missing. It wouldn't allow anything malicious, but instead of a validatiom error it'd just 500).

When he left, literally less then a week later, one of his systems, which was a prototype and nobody except him could maintain, because it was done in a fancy new technology, which wasn't even v1 at that time and their documentation said, it's production ready when we release v1. Anyway, that one system started crashing just few days after him leaving. Another Dev and me tried to fix it, but every time we touched it, it just got worse.

At some point, we gave up and just configured a cron job to reboot it every 12h. He could have probably fixed it, but to us it was just black magic.

Anyhow, this rent isn't about him, AFAIK all the systems still working, as long as you provide the correct input. Nor is it about the management decisions, which lead to this Frankenstein service on live support, which we had to increase, to be restarted every 8 hours, 6h, 4h, 3h, .....

It's about the service itself, which I'm looking forward to every day, when the rewrite will be done and I can nuke the whole git repository.

I was even thinking about moving all the related files onto a USB stick and putting that on 🔥, once we're done rewriting it....

Maybe next month or in 2. Hopefully before we'll have to configure the cron job to restart the service every couple minutes....

It's the small things. Chronos task run syntax:

- P10M = 10 months
- PT10M = 10 minutes

And for some reason, lots of our task are defined to only run every 10 months, should be run every 10 minutes though.

Even weirder: Why do most of our tasks run daily? Either we have some cron job task firing curl requests at chronos rest api, or some poor content managers clicks a button daily.

At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.

When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.

Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.

The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??

> Get sent to local client that manages most services on prem themselves
> We just deliver the software and setup instructions, client is self-proclaimed "technical enough" to handle the rest
> Never had issues with them, client for about 1,5year, we assume they are indeed technical enough
> Local client needs me for some help with their "backup solution"
> Cron job that dd's entire disk every week to external ssd.
> External ssd finally caved in after what was most likely years of torture
> Has nothing even remotely to do with our software (which has built-in backups, which they apparently don't use)
> I get scolded and screamed at when I say not our problem

Fml

I personally hate that ad blockers block analytics software, specially since (as by the law) users must give consent before it collects data, several options exist to opt-out, and they are not f'ing ads.
I've been thinking to set a cron job to fetch analytics.js regularly and serve it locally as, let's say jquery-4.0.js, and screw it. What's your insight about it, fellow frontend devs?

Hello guys, just want to ask if any one has done a speedtest result twitter auto poster? Like a cron job that executes a speedtest... test the post the result to twitter as to show our telco how shitty their service is.

I am thinking of selenium script but I wanted it to run on raspberry pi. Do you think it's doable?

Favorite / most used systemd timers?

I recently wrote one to pull the location data of users for an app and make a heat map of sorts which updates every hour. Probably could make it run on a quicker timer but not many eyes on it at the moment.