In "Scripting Solutions with WSH and COM: Give Your PCs a Wake-Up Call," February 2002, InstantDoc ID 23602, I demonstrated how to use Wake on LAN (WOL) technology to wake up your PCs. Unless you plan to stay awake with your computers all night so that you can wake them up and run the scripts manually, you need a way to schedule tasks automatically. I introduce you to the power of automatically scheduling your scripts on Windows XP systems and provide a few simple scripts that show you how automated tasks work.
The Good Old Cron Days
Since the early days of PC systems management, I've used a dedicated PC in the data center rather than a server to run scheduled tasks automatically across the network. When I began searching for software that I could use to schedule tasks, I wanted something that worked similarly to the UNIX cron daemon. This daemon schedules automated tasks according to entries in stored configuration files called crontabs, then outputs the results to log files called cronlogs. I discovered a PC version of this UNIX utility that runs permanently in DOS, scheduling tasks that I add to the crontab file. To this day, my dedicated scheduling PC is known as "the cron machine," even though I've upgraded it to XP so that it can run all automated tasks across the network. . . .
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