I can't make this stuff up. Seriously.

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~Two stories for you today!



User (ticket):
Soooo...we just updated and we found a bug!!!11 See, if it's 10:30 AM and make a cron job to execute at 10:31 AM and save it before 10:31 AM, the job is never done! However...if it's 10:30 AM and I create a cron job for 10:32 AM and save it before 10:31 AM, it executes fine! The doc says taht cron scans at the top of every minute. Why isn't this working?! The old one worked.

Me(ticket):
Hi, I've noticed the same behavior on my system. I believe it's just an issue with exactly when you save the job and blah blah blah. I suggest that you set up your cron jobs three to five minutes in advance of the time you'd like them executed. If you'd like, I can continue to look into the issue. Love, Kitty (RHCE)

User(ticket):
Could you look into it for me? I'd really like to know if this is just a bug, or if this is behavor we should expect in the future. I mean, it was REALLY weird when our cron jobs weren't executed!

Me (irc):
Guys, I have a crazy question. *repeats ticket*

Boss (irc):
tell me you're kidding.

Coworkers (irc):
HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA.

Boss (irc):
If you're not making this up, then you should probally escalate it to an L2, who will shrug and escalate it to the engineers...who will then laugh at it.

L2 (irc):
This is going to be one of those tickets that's open forever isn't it?

Boss (irc):
Yes.

L2s (irc):
NOT IT.



~And...back when I worked at the campus helpdesk, we got a frantic call from a kid that was something like the following:

HELP. BROKE UP WITH GIRLFRIEND AND SHE CHANGED MY CAMPUS ACCOUNT PASSWORD. PLEASE HELP.

~So many things wrong with that. :-D ~

Comments

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Dude I don't understand the first story at all. What is a cron job? Is this some strange sexual practice I've been missing out on? Where's the comedy dammit?!

[kuang.livejournal.com]

Cron lets you execute scripts under Unix at predetermined times. The humour here is more of the..

Patient: It hurts when I do this
Doctor: Don't do that then..

..variety :)

[canthlian.livejournal.com]

Scheduled task system under Linux. Minutely, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly...

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Think of a cron job like scheduling a task to run at a certain time.

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~Heh, sorry. What you need to know about cron is that it's like an alarm. It "goes off" at certian times and executes whatever you tell it to.

~The basic point of the pointing and laughing is...why schedual something for one minute in the future?! LOTS of somethings at various times, according to the ticket! Why not just wait a minute and execute them? Or--better yet! Hire an intern!

~Or, better yet...plan into the future! Set your stuff up FIVE minutes in advance. If you want to test your cron job...set it for a reasonable time in the future.

~So the point of the point is...people are silly.~

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Sweet.

Your second anecdote reminds me of a call I got when working at Dell. This guy called, and his name was on the account, so I knew the computer technically belonged to him, or I wouldn't have gotten involved...

He had broken up with his girlfriend and she had taken it badly and set a BIOS password on the computer. He'd never seen such a thing before and was desperate to get his graduation thesis off the computer.

Since his name was on the account, I cheerfully walked him through opening the case and moving the jumpers to reset the password. Poor guy. Sometimes you just can't win for trying.

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~HAhaha! Breaking up with people and computers...it just doesn't mix. When I broke up with my last bf, I changed all my passwords on principle.~

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

It's like Windows Task Scheduler, only far less sucky.

Plus it gives you nerd points.

[kalium.livejournal.com]

And it can do stuff.

[valancy17.livejournal.com]

but . . . but . . . 5 minutes in advance is such a llllooooooonnnnngggg time!

also, about the password thing - I've run into that before, only on the other end. I had a roommate who's completely computer-illiterate but when her bf dropped out of school @ the university where she worked, he asked her to get a Unix account so he could use it. Free ISP and all. While they were dating, I didn't say anything, but when they broke up, I logged into her account and changed that password to keep him from mooching off her even more - or maybe even getting her in trouble with the university.

I also have morons putting the wrong email addy in when they sign up for websites so I get all these messages that say "Welcome to our website, Mary!" Since I can't usually find out who they are, I'll log into the websites as them (I can get their password sent to my email address, after all) and change the password.

p.s. I don't think it was an unreasonable expectation that you wouldn't have to explain a cron job here. I know not everyone knows Unix, but more people would here than most places.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

See also: far less sucky.

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

Ive never seen Cron execute a job at anything other then the exact millisecond the time the job is scedualed to occour happens.

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~This is aparently a bug of some sort in RHEL4...I hesitate to even call it a bug...

~Basically, the crontab is scanned every minute to see if there are any new jobs that it should schedual. Aparently, if you don't define your job and save it atleast 2 mintues in advance, it won't register with it, and so it won't execute.

~I'm not sure that it's really a bug, however...it could just be a slight behavior change.~

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~I know! Preplanning is totally for losers.

~HAH, that's AWESOME. free stuff for yoooou!

~We used to rearrange the icons on people's desktops when they stayed logged in at a lab computer. :-D

~Well...*shrugs* I didn't know what a cron job really was until I started on at a Linux company (and had to get my RHCE). So....yeah.~

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Eh, they probably use it for testing. As in "I will need job X to run from cron at some future point, so I better test that cron will launch it properly and that my cron-fu is typo-resistant. To cut down on the wait time until this test runs, I will set the test cron job to one minute from now instead of two... huh, that's odd."

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~That makes perfect sense. I can defedentally say that is a strong possibility. But at that point...why one minute as opposed to two make such a big differenece?

~it really didn't strike me as a 'this is odd' claa...more as a 'this is a bug that is impacting us!' e-mail. But then, that could be the user's natural histeria.....~

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but did you change his passwords?

I'm old enough that my first boyfriend broke up with me over ytalk/telnet.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

One minute instead of two because, well, one's more efficient :)

And the hysteria because yikes, if cron has something wrong with it, what other previously-thought-bulletproof functions on that system might have all the developmental structural integrity of quicksand?

[valancy17.livejournal.com]

~We used to rearrange the icons on people's desktops when they stayed
logged in at a lab computer. :-D

I freaked out an old boss of mine at the university when I snuck into her office before she got in for the day and reset her screensaver to the marquee and had it saying "want to go get coffee?"

She came running over and was like "that was amazing! how did you do that?!?" I was tempted to give her a big long explanation involving telepathically sending that message to her computer, but I'm too much of a softie to pull that off.