Vixie Cron How I Loath Thee.....

As some know, I work as the senior systems administrator for a company in the southeast SF Bay Area. Recently, we had to move to a new security system, after having been broken into four times in the last _four_ years.

One of the features of this new system is that it ties into our phone system to alert the building that the alarm is about to be armed. To do this, a dial out to a special phone number needs to occur at the desired hour and then voila! Instant Alert throughout our suite! So, we've setup an email to fax service that we can easily trigger by a simple email.

So I wrote a REALLY simple shell script shown below (with the fax and email addresses elided):

#!/bin/bash

set -e

echo "Sending Security Page NOW!"

/usr/sbin/sendmail -t <<EOF
FROM: SOMERANDOMSMUCK@minervanetworks.com
TO:   1234567890@fax.com
CC:   SOMERANDOMSMUCK@minervanetworks.com
SUBJECT: Alarm Set

Set.

EOF

RET=$?
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "SUCCESS"
fi

As I said, simple.

From there I setup my crontab on one of the Linux box in my cube to have it go off at the apropriote time, 7:55PM Monday through Friday:

MAILTO=SOMERANDOMSMUCK@minervanetworks.com

50 19 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/securityfax.sh

Tested out the script, thinking that "Hey, I'm all done". Wrong.

I come to find out that Vixie Cron can't seem to tell time! I get the alert emails at 8:31PM from the system!

At this point, looks like I'll be replacing Vixie Cron on my workstation (CentOS 5). Can anyone advise a good Cron Daemon replacement that has enough similarities to vixie cron that I won't have to relearn too much and can actually interpret time settings in the crontab as more than mere suggestions?

Qt, Nokia, and the Internet Rambling.....

So, most of you who read my blog know about Nokia's deal with Microsoft. To re-iterate the best image posting I've seen on planetkde via John Layt's blog: Keep Calm and Carry On.

Yes, Microsoft has been a major negative force on computing, especially with regards to the freedoms of end users. This however does not warrant the extreme and in many ways self-defeating knee-jerk reactions that have been permeating the Interwebs oft lately on the F/OSS blogs.

Lets rather, take a wait and see approach to this. There really isn't enough information on the ground at this point in the game to know what is or is not going to occur in the immediate or even long-term for Qt Development Frameworks at Nokia. Lets trust in our friends at Nokia to gather up the information that the community is craving to know and get it ready for public consumption.

Until then, Nothing to See Here, Move Along.