Windows Tip: Run applications in the background using Task Scheduler

Posted on July 21st, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I was working on a project a couple of weeks ago which involves Celery for processing tasks.  I wanted the Celery process to run in the background as a service but it didn’t come with a Windows service installer, we will have to write our own.  Since we were still just working on a proof of concept, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this at this point and then I realized I could probably just use the built in Windows Task Scheduler application.

The reason I wanted Celery to run in the background as a service was because one of the worker nodes we’re using is shared with another group.  They may need to reboot the machine at any time or log off my user session which would kill the Celery process.  I wanted the Celery process to automatically start when Windows starts, run silently in the background using a user account I specify, automatically restart the task on failure, and manage it remotely without fully logging in to the machine where it runs.

I was able to accomplish all of the above by simply using Task Scheduler.  Below are the settings I used. Read the rest of this entry »

How to enable Telnet on Windows 7

Posted on July 10th, 2011 webmaster 1 comment          Print

We have a computer at work that runs on Windows 7 and I needed to check whether it can connect to our internal SMTP server so I can use it to send emails. The quickest way to do this is to telnet to the SMTP server on port 25 but it turned out telnet is disabled/not installed by default on Windows 7. It gave the message “‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.”

Here’s how to enable it:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Programs.
2. Under Programs and Features, click Turn Windows features on or off.
3. Check Telnet Client and click OK.

Source: http://www.fettesps.com/windows-7-enable-telnet/

How to sync the date and time to a time server in Ubuntu Linux (command line)

Posted on June 16th, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I just logged in to my Rackspace hosted virtual server running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and noticed that the time drifted almost a couple of minutes.

Type in the command below to sync your server’s date and time to a time server (where ntp.ubuntu.com is the time server):

sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

To automatically correct the time drifting issue in the future, you could also install the ntp daemon:

sudo apt-get install ntp