Call me a bitter unix user if you must, but after today, I need to vent some of my Windows related frustration.

Today, we found that the scheduled tasks we have setup on one of our, rather important, servers, just decided to stop working.  When they run, as scheudled, as a user, they return a result code of "0x80", and do nothing.  If you run them as a logged in user, they work perfectly. What’s up with that?!  Turns out that this is a bug!  Yes, microsoft managed to screw up the TASK SCHEDULER, of all things.  The problem is, that this bug was supposedly fixed in SP2 for Windows 2003.  Guess what?  The server in question already has SP2 on it!  You know what they say to do to fix this now?  Delete all of the tasks, reinstall SP2, reboot, re-add your tasks.

What?  You want me to uninstall a core OS update, on a production machine?!  Why in the hell would iw ant to do that?! All to fix the task scheduler?  Mind you, this scheduler worked perfectly until just a few days ago.  No updates were installed, no permissions changed, nothing, the issue arose on its own, as far as we can tell. 

This is so frustrating.  You have no idea.  It’s no secret that i’m a Unix/Linux fan.  This very site runs on Linux.  When was the last time i had a cron job spontaneously stop running?  Let me think….. NEVER!  unless there was a problem with the target of the job, which isnt cron’s fault!  In this case, the program which is to run works perfectly, its the scheduler itself that’s busted.

How can microsoft get away with charging so much money, for such crap?  Yea, i know Unix  isnt bug free.  There are plenty of very nasty bugs and exploits which will ruin any unix admin’s day, but at least theyre not with core OS utilities, like the task scheduler! 

I cant remember the last time i rebooted my server.  I bet if i were to go check uptime right now, it’d be 100+ days.

[war@www ~]$ uptime
 18:02:26 up 264 days, 22:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.03

There you have it, 264 days. That’s what, 9 months?  Sure, i’ve seen windows servers up that long too, but not if you plan to actually keep the system up to date.  You;ll be rebooting once a week if you run updates as often as you probably should.  90% of the updates i run on my server wont reboot the server.  And if a reboot is requred, i’m not forced into it like on windows.  Most things can be reloaded without a reboot.  Why cant Microsoft grasp that idea? 

I think i;m going to try to convince my boss to move his sql database and his parsing scripts to MySQL and linux.  I’ll let you know how _that_ goes over.