inquiry

I can't tell you how much I despise Microsoft Windows.

Things that are so simple in Linux tend to be horrific, poorly documented nightmares complete with unimaginable silent failures at – per Murphy – the least expected times, in the least anticipate-able ways.

So on Linux: cron.. boom!

Similar on Windows?

Well, I guess there is attempting to wrap one's code in way that Windows treats it as a service, but I've never seen a description of how to accomplish that successfully that didn't look like attempting to boil all the oceans at once – and maybe a couple continents thrown in there for sadist good measure.

Then there's scheduling tasks. Okay, much simpler. Or seemingly simpler.

But my task uses “winscp” at one point (a usage kludge compared to “sftp/scp”), and that was quietly failing for a while that – after some painful (for not knowing what keywords to use) search online, eventually leading me to changing:

open sftp://MYID:MYPW#@MYIP:MYPORT

to:

open sftp://MYID:MYPW#@MYIP:MYPORT -hostkey”ssh-dss 1024 <SHA-256 of the remote host>“

(see what I added on the end?)

because, otherwise, despite telling the scheduler to run as ME, something about winscp apparently didn't think it was me, because the answer to a one-time question I had to answer the first time I ran it against that host manually (months ago) apparently wasn't to be found when run by the scheduler, so winscp was stopping to ask the question as though the scheduler were a person able to type a one-character answer and hit <enter>, which of course it couldn't do, so it just sat there, and eventually winscp timed out for not receiving the answer it needed...

Well, okay, so I fixed that put the above change... but now something about attempting to access MS SQL Server databases is silently not working – I imagine for the scheduler not seeming to be me despite having told it to pretend to be me. So now I'm going to have to add lotsa painful debug code, lotsa timestamped print statements, and, of course, hope that tells me something the first time, otherwise I'll need to add more.. and yadda yadda until the issue is obvious...

And of course cycling through that is going to take much time. And, in the meantime, customers need for this to be working, so I'll have to be running the same manually while logged in so Windows (<bleep> you very much, Bill Gates) doesn't <bleep> things up for its scheduler being either deficient, or not working as advertised...

Or – very possible – perhaps I'm simply an idiotic clown....?