[Samba] task scheduler in Samba ?

[Jonathan Johnson]

Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:

> I looked into this some more.  It's works a little
> differently than I initially thought.  The registry
> paths are used to detect the presence of the task
> scheduling agent on the remote host.  The actual jobs
> are simply stored as files.
>
> In my mind this would fit pretty well as just
> a ~/cron directory for a given user.  For example,
> it I run a job as jerry, then the job script would
> be stored in ~jerry/cron and a crontab entry would
> be made in /var/spool/cron/jerry.
>
> I'm still thinking this over.  The other detail
> is to figure out the file format used to present
> the job properties dialog to Windows.  This is
> probably already decoded somewhere (similar to
> *lnk files or something). 

FYI/FWIW, on my Windows XP machine, the jobs in the local task scheduler 
are binary files located in the hidden folder %SYSTEMROOT%\Tasks\ with a 
filename extension of .job.

This folder is one of those "special" folders that Windows Explorer 
displays differently. You can't copy files into or out of this folder 
using Explorer, nor can you view any files other than .job files. To 
copy into, out of, or list the contents of this folder, you're pretty 
much stuck with a command shell.

To display the properties of a scheduled task, the library mstask.dll is 
used.  Some of the relevent registry keys (an incomplete list) used are:
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.job
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\JobObject
       (Note, there are several other similarly named keys)
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{148BD520-A2AB-11CE-B11F-00AA00530503}
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{148BD52A-A2AB-11CE-B11F-00AA00530503}

Also, you may find the command line interface to the task scheduler, 
schtasks.exe, useful. Documentation can be found here: 
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/schtasks.mspx

Hope this helps you & the developers, Jerry. Maybe you already knew all 
this. :-)

--Jonathan Johnson
Sutinen Consulting, Inc.
jon at sutinen.com