Re: Scheduling tasks the _hard

Does the HTTP output have to originate from the server with the draconian access restrictions?

Is the remote machine totally firewalled off? I know for mySQL (and most other databases) you can easily connect to the DB remotely, (for mySQL it's port 3306) meaning you can run the script on another machine with a crontab entry, and just connect/disconnect to the remote DB in the specified time period.

Another option- write your script on the remote machine to just report the results of the query, either in some XML format or pipe-delimited, and then ding that script periodically and parse the info out with LWP::Simple and split().

Here's an article from my personal site that does something similar to what I'm talking about above.

Good luck!

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

Comment on Re: Scheduling tasks the _hard_ way

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Re: Re: Scheduling tasks the _hard_ way by Yukio (Sexton) on Oct 17, 2001 at 00:56 UTC
Thanks for your fast reply. Unfortunately, we don't have much of a choice in the server solution we're using. As much as I'd like to set up a dedicated host of my own, we don't have the skills in-house to maintain a secure server. Also, this project involves an ecommerce component, so I need to keep it as localized as possible -- including this script. Also, this problem has nothing to do with firewalls or even security, believe it or not. I'm sure I could actually manage to wangle the server into doing what I want, or intentionally spin off a zombie or two to manage the task of keeping the process going. Unfortunately, the host would probably start killing off the processes as soon as it saw them. The host just doesn't want its clients messing with its machines -- so no terminal access and no scheduled tasks. I won't name the company, but it is fairly big and well-known. It just doesn't trust its clients. Thanks for the suggestions, though. I hope someone else has some equally helpful suggestions.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Scheduling tasks the _hard_ way
by Yukio (Sexton) on Oct 17, 2001 at 00:56 UTC

Unfortunately, we don't have much of a choice in the server solution we're using. As much as I'd like to set up a dedicated host of my own, we don't have the skills in-house to maintain a secure server. Also, this project involves an ecommerce component, so I need to keep it as localized as possible -- including this script.

Also, this problem has nothing to do with firewalls or even security, believe it or not. I'm sure I could actually manage to wangle the server into doing what I want, or intentionally spin off a zombie or two to manage the task of keeping the process going. Unfortunately, the host would probably start killing off the processes as soon as it saw them. The host just doesn't want its clients messing with its machines -- so no terminal access and no scheduled tasks. I won't name the company, but it is fairly big and well-known. It just doesn't trust its clients.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

I hope someone else has some equally helpful suggestions.

[reply]