It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

[plonq]

I currently have three machines at my immediate disposal. One of them (the old OS/2 box) doesn't do much these days, but I keep the two Windows boxes hopping. I do most of the development on the Win2K box that is sitting on my desk (long overdue for an upgrade to XP), and the balance of the actual work happens on the XP lab machine at the head office. I control that one through a (surprisingly responsive) remote desktop. Since my local desktop has multiple monitors, I have given each computer its own monitor. It is a very convenient arrangement, but...

The remote machine has a problem.

There is a known issue with our XP image; it has a memory leak, and if it is not rebooted once every ten days or so, the machine eventually fails and requires somebody to do a local power-cycle to get it going again. That's no problem for me, since I can just open up a command shell on the remote machine and type "shutdown -r -t 0" to force an immediate restart -- if I remember. I was going to put up a Post-It on my monitor saying, "reboot the robot every Friday" when I had an ingenious inspiration.

Why don't I just write a script to reboot it automatically every Friday at 23:00?

Brilliant!

I had everything set up and ready to go when a sane little voice in the back of my head said, ".. and you're planning to come in at 23:05 to sign the machine back in again after it reboots?" D'oh! The best laid plans... I'm glad that little detail occurred to me before I scheduled this thing. Back to the Post-It I suppose.

Comments

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

By any chance, do you use Outlook, or any other program that has some schedule management capability that includes pop-up reminders of when you're supposed to do something like go to a meeting?

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I do - and that's a much better idea than a Post-It. I have to leave Outlook running on this machine at all times anyway because I have tasks scheduled to run against it.

[giza.livejournal.com]

> to sign the machine back in again after it reboots

Issues like that are why I got away from using Windows for any sort of "mission critical" things years ago.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I don't have any say in the matter.

We're in a bit of a row with the vendor just now over these machines. They misconfigured something in the image, leading to a memory leak that eventually causes them to crash if they are not regularly rebooted. They have agreed to investigate the problem if we pay them some more.

That's the kind of business model I want to fashion a company around. We'll deliver a broken product to the customer and then demand more money if they want it fixed.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Well that just sucks.

Would it be possible to set up Virtual PC, run the problem program under a virtual machine, and externally (though Virtual PC) reboot the virtual machine and use autologin?

Based on the other comments I read here, I think that would address both your issues and IT's issues regarding auto-login, since the console would stay locked.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Program it to reboot Monday morning just before you come in?

-TG

[plonq.livejournal.com]

That's not a bad idea either - if everything runs like it should, it is usually caught up by the time I get to work, so it would be rebooting itself around the time I was coming in the door.

To be honest, I'm always a little leery about setting up automation on our work machines. Our vendor has a habit of pushing down seemingly-minor changes that can have a serious impact.

Back when we were still using OS2 workstations, a minor upgrade to the OS caused one of my scheduled reports to become possessed. When I came to work in the morning I discovered that it had sent over 300 emails to the director of our US office, each with the line "I fart in your general direction!" repeated 700 times.

Fortunately they had an innocuous subject line, and he deleted them all unread without ever seeing the content of the messages. I honestly didn't expect to escape that one unfired.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

*sputter*

*snork*

BWAAA HAA HAA HAA HAA!!! =D

You lucky bastard. :D

-The Gneech

[plonq.livejournal.com]

When I got to work that morning and saw what had happened (rather, what was still happenning), my first thought was, "I wish I had worn my brown pants today..."

I was pretty sure I was going to be fired, or at least demoted back to the ranks.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Wow, I think that wins. Not just because it's a big bug, but because it shows exactly why developers should not use stupid error messages like that.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Ayup. I learned a valuable lesson that day.

I got into a bit of a Python zone while writing that one. Various return codes included, "I fart in your general direction", "My hovercraft is full of eels", "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries".

Now my return codes tend to be numeric.

[leopanthera.livejournal.com]

Automatic login?

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Even if I could get that to work, I shudder to think what IT would do if they caught me setting up a machine with automatic login...

I have already pushed the boundaries a bit by patching MS Office to override the security in Outlook on that machine.

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

Why isn't your remote display software service-level? You can use VNC at a service-level so that the VNC terminal actually starts before login. You login with a secure credential (RealVNC allows Windows User-Level Logins) and that logs in the computer at the same time....