EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
Home / Tags / Scheduler
Scheduler

#Scheduler

6 articles
Monitoring
The App Uses UTC, People Use Thai Time — 7 Hours Off, No Errors
Linux

The App Uses UTC, People Use Thai Time — 7 Hours Off, No Errors

Scheduled for three in the afternoon, published at ten at night. No errors, nothing wrong in the logs, because the app stores UTC while the person entering the time thinks in Thai time. This article traces the issue from an env setting that has no effect to the single line that writes Thai wall-clock time into a column everyone reads as UTC.

#laravel#php#mariadb#debugging
9 min read·11 Oct
News Stuck for Three Days Because the Feed Wasn't Sorted by Date
Linux

News Stuck for Three Days Because the Feed Wasn't Sorted by Date

The news site's homepage showed the same day's stories for three days straight, even though scheduled jobs ran, translations finished, and every step reported success. The causes were an RSS feed sorted by relevance rather than date, string sorting of pubDate that actually sorted by weekday name, and requesting too few stories, leaving nothing after filtering before the rest even got a look.

#python#javascript#rss#automation
10 min read·25 Sep
CDP Still Responds but Commands Fail After Chrome Updates Itself
Linux

CDP Still Responds but Commands Fail After Chrome Updates Itself

I run several automation jobs on one machine that need a real browser, and ran into two problems at once — jobs fighting over tabs and getting each other's results, and Chrome overwriting its own files during an update while the process was still running, leaving the port responsive but Runtime.evaluate unusable. This article covers how I isolate jobs, detect the failure, and repair it automatically.

#cdp#chromium#automation#windows
9 min read·23 Sep
A 25-Hour Power Outage Left Scheduled Jobs Missing
Linux

A 25-Hour Power Outage Left Scheduled Jobs Missing

The machine running my automated jobs lost power three times in three days, with the longest outage lasting 25 hours. When it came back, I found that jobs scheduled directly through Task Scheduler had skipped their runs entirely, while jobs managed by a dispatcher that checked the time itself had all caught up. This article covers the setting to enable, what to avoid during recovery, and the traps that led me to misread the status.

#windows#scheduler#automation#powershell
9 min read·22 Sep
Every Layer Reported Success While the Output Was Garbage
Linux

Every Layer Reported Success While the Output Was Garbage

In one day, four layers of the same automated pipeline failed together, but every layer reported success without a single error line. The person who caught it was a user who said the site was not updating. These are the rules I wrote afterward so that failing stages could speak up for themselves.

#automation#python#monitoring#debugging
10 min read·15 Sep
Automating Remote Windows Tasks with SSH + Task Scheduler
Linux

Automating Remote Windows Tasks with SSH + Task Scheduler

Move heavy workloads to a more powerful machine over SSH, then automate them with schtasks — with pitfalls that cost me real time, from landing in PowerShell 5 instead of bash over ssh, to backslashes getting swallowed when writing .bat files, to file transfers hanging until I switched to plink

#windows#ssh#powershell#automation
9 min read·26 Aug