Scheduled Tasks: Reliable?

[j]

Our IS department recommends using Automate4 scheduling software to schedule
a handful of tasks on our WinNT 4.0 Server and now our Win2k Server, but I
would like to NOT install another piece of software on our server, and use
Windows Scheduled Tasks instead. (Between all of the third party software,
i.e., security/policy orchestrator, performance monitoring, availability
monitoring, remote control, remote management, anti-virus, diagnostic, etc.,
there aren't any resources left to run the apps that we bought the server
for!)

Eight scheduled tasks will run bat files every weeknight, and one scheduled
task will run a VB app every thirty minutes for a twelve hour period on
weekdays.

I know Scheduled tasks can do this stuff, I was wondering if it could do it
reliably day-in and day-out. Is this what it was designed for? Has anyone
used scheduled tasks in such a manner on a production server? Any reason
not to use scheduled tasks? Any insight to potential problems?

Thanks!

 

[Ray at]

I 100% agree with what you want to do. I have scheduled tasks running on a
number of servers, and I can't remember any issues with them (except for
when I screwed something up by messing around or something).

This one particular piece of junk third party software requires that we copy
12 Access database to each user's home directory every night. I just have a
simple .bat file that runs every night. No problems there. I also have
another one to delete all the .ldb files left behind when this program
crashes on people every day.

Try to explain to these people that it is total nonsense to purchase a third
party product to perform tasks that Windows can do on its own. All these
third party things do is add confusion, instability, and debt.

Ray at work

 

[David H. Lipman]

Jeff:

Our "company" has a mandate to perform a scan for viruses on a daily basis. I use the MS
Tasker to perform this task on every PC @ 1145hrs when the vast majority are at lunch. As
noted by the McAfee logs, the scheduled task goes off w/o a hitch on every PC that is
turned on whether a user is logged on or not.

I also have other tasks scheduled on our Network Management System and all tasks execute as
expected.

I'd say it is very reliable.

A little feedback, is stead of plain old batch files, I suggest the use of the KixTart
Script Interpreter (http://kixtart.org) it has a wealth of routines and functions that make
it an ideal replacement for the simplistic interpreted command of the old DOS batch
language.

Dave


| Our IS department recommends using Automate4 scheduling software to schedule
| a handful of tasks on our WinNT 4.0 Server and now our Win2k Server, but I
| would like to NOT install another piece of software on our server, and use
| Windows Scheduled Tasks instead. (Between all of the third party software,
| i.e., security/policy orchestrator, performance monitoring, availability
| monitoring, remote control, remote management, anti-virus, diagnostic, etc.,
| there aren't any resources left to run the apps that we bought the server
| for!)
|
| Eight scheduled tasks will run bat files every weeknight, and one scheduled
| task will run a VB app every thirty minutes for a twelve hour period on
| weekdays.
|
| I know Scheduled tasks can do this stuff, I was wondering if it could do it
| reliably day-in and day-out. Is this what it was designed for? Has anyone
| used scheduled tasks in such a manner on a production server? Any reason
| not to use scheduled tasks? Any insight to potential problems?
|
| Thanks!
|
| --
| Jeff McAhren
| Dallas, Texas
|
|

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Our IS department recommends using Automate4 scheduling software to schedule
a handful of tasks on our WinNT 4.0 Server and now our Win2k Server, but I
would like to NOT install another piece of software on our server, and use
Windows Scheduled Tasks instead. (Between all of the third party software,
i.e., security/policy orchestrator, performance monitoring, availability
monitoring, remote control, remote management, anti-virus, diagnostic, etc.,
there aren't any resources left to run the apps that we bought the server
for!)

Eight scheduled tasks will run bat files every weeknight, and one scheduled
task will run a VB app every thirty minutes for a twelve hour period on
weekdays.

I know Scheduled tasks can do this stuff, I was wondering if it could do it
reliably day-in and day-out. Is this what it was designed for? Has anyone
used scheduled tasks in such a manner on a production server? Any reason
not to use scheduled tasks? Any insight to potential problems?

Thanks!

I have used the WinNT/Win2000 Task Scheduler for many years.
It works extremely reliably, if used properly.

You might find quite a few posts from people who complain about
their Task Scheduler working intermittently. The failure is almost
always caused by their lack of understanding how it works,
and what account they must use to run it. For example: Scheduling
a task that copies files from a network share, and using an account
with insufficient access rights to that share, will always fail.

There is one known issue that might affect you: If your system disk
uses FAT32 (instead of NTFS) then your tasks might fail when
daylight saving time ends at the end of October, unless Microsoft
have fixed the problem with SP4.

 

[Colon Terminus]

Yep, scheduled tasks will do the job just fine. I question your IS depts
advice to use third party scheduling software. Does your IS dept manager own
stock in Automate4?

 

[Christian Rousseau]

The only problem I have with the task scheduler is the monitoring...
If you have many servers with scheduled jobs configured locally on
each server, you probably want to monitor your job if something is
going wrong. For exemple, we have a job configured to import
something every hours... the day after, I got clients frustrated
because the importation was not running since the last day... I
checked the Scheduled task and I saw the job Running... The job was
stuck since the last day. The "Stop job after x hours" didn't work.

As a professional, I always want to be pro-active, be awared of
problem before clients told me something is wrong with my system! I
tried WMI objects (win32_ScheduledJob) but this doesn't work for that
kind of monitoring. The only way I found was to parse the scheduler
logfile. Nothing else is available to query a job status.

I thing using the Windows Task Scheduler is not a serious solution for
critical or important tasks.

Chris

 

[Michael]

Task scheduler is unreliable for day to day tasks -- it
stops working following many of the security updates that
many of us in academic/commercial environments have
automatically applied. After these, it reports that
account information cannot be found, and you have to
resupply the passwords. I've been trying to use it for
critical everyday tasks, and the only solution I have
found is to disconnect from the network and not apply the
updates. Very unsatisfactory. As Chris says, there is no
way of monitoring what is going on, and parsing the
logfile only tells me too late that it has failed -- and I
loose a lot of data this way. I'm now testing whether I
can do all I need to do by shelling out from a constantly-
running PowerBASIC file -- so far so good, but we'll see.
michael

-----Original Message-----
The only problem I have with the task scheduler is the monitoring...
If you have many servers with scheduled jobs configured locally on
each server, you probably want to monitor your job if something is
going wrong. For exemple, we have a job configured to import
something every hours... the day after, I got clients frustrated
because the importation was not running since the last day... I
checked the Scheduled task and I saw the job Running... The job was
stuck since the last day. The "Stop job after x hours" didn't work.

As a professional, I always want to be pro-active, be awared of
problem before clients told me something is wrong with my system! I
tried WMI objects (win32_ScheduledJob) but this doesn't work for that
kind of monitoring. The only way I found was to parse the scheduler
logfile. Nothing else is available to query a job status.

I thing using the Windows Task Scheduler is not a serious solution for
critical or important tasks.

Chris

"Colon Terminus" <[email protected]> wrote in

message [email protected]>...

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I'm afraid I have to disagree:

- Apart from the know issue at DST, the Task Scheduler works very
reliably when configured correctly. I have several machines that use
it, they all get regular security updates, and they never miss a beat.
I suspect the unreliability you report is caused by an underlying
problem.

- "As Chris says, there is no way of monitoring what is going on".
This is plain wrong. It is very easy to monitor scheduled tasks.
You can, for example, force a backup job to create an automatic
EMail at the end of its run. You could also work with semaphore
files that are monitored by other machines.

 

[Bill James]

I second your comments. My work group has over 500 unattended Windows boxes, mostly Windows 2000, which use scheduled tasks for nightly reboot and other weekly maintenance. I rarely see a problem with existing tasks not running, and these systems are kept current on all Critical Updates. I always test a new task when it is set up, but if it runs then it usually continues to do so. On a very rare occasion I find one that has stopped working, and the usually recreating the task is easier than troubleshooting the failing one. Usually it is just one task that is failing where multiple tasks are in place, so it is not a matter of the scheduler itself failing.

--

Bill James
Microsoft MVP - Shell/User

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