Wednesday, August 20

Entomology

I so hate it when Micro$oft decides it's in the best interest of the populace that they should change something in an operating system for "security reasons".

Then they get away with calling the change as being "by design".

I recently had to "upgrade" the server the CAWS database is hosted on. Replaced it with an entirely different PC. The database app had been running on a gig of memory; that proved to be far too little for the number of animals in the database - now beyond 2,500. We're up to four gig of RAM, and a 2.4-gigahertz processor.

And an operating system change.

Was the OS change necessary? Not really, besides, everything should just fall into place once I copy everything from the old server to the new one.

Three days and some choice words later, everything has finally fallen into place.

Oh, it only took about fifteen minutes to copy everything over. The rest of the time was getting Windows XP to stop messing with my head to get the batch files to work like they had on Windows 2000.

The CAWS database server runs MySQL; the client app runs on top of Java. No, not that Java, the other Java. No, the other other Java.

It's a really neat app, don't get me wrong. It's called Animal Shelter Manager (ASM), and was written by a guy in the UK for his local animal shelter. Quite a robust app. If you're a rescue group or know of one, take a look. Oh, and the app's price is hard to beat.

So anyway, after ASM does all of its cool stuff in the background, a bunch of batch files manipulate the data to create the CAWS website and make backups of the database. And they worked pretty dang well. But on Windows XP they came to a grinding halt.

The problem for three days? Coming up with the correct keywords that would produce the correct outcome at Google. That's what it's really all about.

It boils down to this: Getting a batch file - any batch file it appears - to work in Windows XP, the user starting the job as a scheduled task cannot have a blank password.

In earlier days that would be called a "bug". Now it's called a "feature".

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