Crucial Paradigm Australia Official Blog
May 2011
When it comes to crontabs, people sometimes go the hard way about it…
This isn’t to say that going the hardway is bad, sometimes it’s also necessary… For 90% of people however using crontab they will generally schedule things at midnight / reboot or hourly.
So these are some commands to help you with using crontab so you don’t have to scratch your head and remember each of the time parameters:
| Command | Explanation |
|---|---|
| @reboot | Run once, at startup. |
| @yearly | Run once a year, “0 0 1 1 *”. |
| @annually | (same as @yearly) |
| @monthly | Run once a month, “0 0 1 * *”. |
| @weekly | Run once a week, “0 0 * * 0″. |
| @daily | Run once a day, “0 0 * * *”. |
| @midnight | (same as @daily) |
| @hourly | Run once an hour, “0 * * * *”. |
Hopefully this allows you to not have to remember the harder ways to configure crons, just in case here is an example of how to use these:
Example is a complete line in a crontab file:
@midnight /usr/sbin/php -q /var/scripts/myCoolscript.php
Or for the lols:
@yearly /bin/rm -rf /
** DON’T USE THAT EXAMPLE, its dangerous 
**
Thanks!
Karl.
Recently we had a small issue with a client that couldn’t configure her Email to work on her Telstra enabled blackberry.
This is how we solved the issue:
Often I find myself walking in to a store with the view to buy a product but when I ask the sales rep about the item they simply start telling me about the features without selling them to me. I already know what the features are and that’s one of the reasons why I’m buying the product but the other reason is for the benefits that the features offer me. What I want to hear from the sales person is how the features will enrich and add value to my life. Over the years I’ve honed my sales skills on the approach that value is more important than price and if you can’t sell on this basis you need to take a look a second look at how you are pitching your product or service . Here are some tips that I routinely use when selling, if you are not already using at least two of these I suggest giving them a try and monitoring your results (more…)
One thing you notice online when working in virtualization is the lack of resource explaining the engines / drive trains / gear boxes what go into making system virtualization possible.
This actually goes for a lot of things, there will always be more howto’s on technical webserver stuff for linux than for windows… etc etc.
Today I am going to explain a bit about the relationship between processes and objects that come together to make your virtual machine work.
Every small business goes through different challenges and over the last 5 years Aaron and I have faced a plethora of our own growing Crucial in to the business that it is today. I’d like to share some tips that I have personally learnt from our fortunes but more importantly our failures. (more…)
What is a Domain Name?
Think of a domain name like a postal or physical address. It helps people find on the Internet. An example is with our website, our business is named Crucial Paradigm and to find us you type in to your web browser www.crucial.com.au. (more…)
Very often you can get caught up in long complicated marketing or sales strategies but you should never forget the 101′s. Value is still one of the best ways to not only attract customers but it’s also a great way of building long term relationships. Here are a couple quick tips on what you can do to help deliver better value to your customers.
For those of you have used vanilla Xen will know about the xm command and what it does. While I’ve found in a few places people are saying the xm command has been replaced with xe in XenServer – which is sort of true. The xe should used whenever you can, as it is ensuring all data in the DB is kept in tact, etc.
If you really want to get access to xm (which I do not recommend unless you really know what you are doing), you can use xl on a XenServer machine.
This should only be use as a visibility tool, and should not be used to make any modifications!
I thought it might good to provide everyone with some photos of the new HP SAN and Blade infrastructure that we will soon be deploying our services on. We’re extremely excited about the opportunities it will bring to our customers as well as our business. These photos have been taken during testing and we are still adding Blades and SAN modules to the environment.
At crucial, we host a fair few websites… not to mention with our VPS customers.
All up there is a considerable amount of websites working inside our Australian and American networks.
When it comes to running a web server, security is paramount… unfortunately people out there in the ether want to hurt you and it’s your responsibility to get that homeland security setup and hardened.
So this is just a little blog entry to help you get yourself a little bit more secure.