Technology is fun and useful, but sometimes it is a pain in the arse. I had been trying to automate some tasks by making cron jobs on my server. Completely trivial, one would think. I have done this a million times before on other systems. Just add some lines to the crontab of the right users and voila, it should work. Wrong, somehow the jobs just would not run. I googled and googled, but found nothing helpful.

This morning I tried again. I got it to work in a couple of minutes. It turns out cron does nothing if you do not give a new line after a task… Aarrgghhh!

I’m going to have some coffee while my ubuntu mirror (http://ubuntu.wenslauw.net) is rebuilding itself.