Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

[Geographicus]

My server company recently upgraded to the plesk control panel. THe panel seems great but all of the cron jobs that I previously created seem not to run under the plesk scheduling system.

These crons (below) which run my Powersearch and Template Data Feed modules were working fine before the plesk upgrad, but now simply do not run. I am working with my server company to isolate the problem, but I wonder if anyone else had these problems and has identified a solution?

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=exprodf&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx&P rovision=yes&Submit=Login&ExProdF_report=11&includ e_status=A&ExProdF_Custom_Fields=1&ExProdF_UI=modu les/ui/mmui.mvc' --no-check-certificate -O - 'https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=powrsrch&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx& Provision=yes&Submit=Login&powrsrch_rebuild=777777 7&powrsrch_fulltext=name,descrip' --no-check-certificate -O - 'http://www.geographicus.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

Kevin

[Geographicus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Quick update. When I run the crons I am getting an error that reads:

-: wget: command not found


Kevin

[titus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's an environment issue. The path isn't set properly. Talk to your host about fixing that. You should be able to get that via /usr/bin.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Not sure if what you posted is identical to the cron job, but the first job is invalid because it has a bunch of spaces in it like "Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps", etc. Andreas is correct that wget is typically /usr/bin/wget so you could try changing the job to that and see if that resolves the issue. If the new version of Plesk is 10.3 there is also a bug with regard to cron job that may prevent it from working even if the path is correct.

[wcw]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Are there any other programs besides wget that can be used for this? The drawback of wget is it dies if you use javascript to refresh the screen. The screen is refreshed just before the miva global timeout when there are large databases. But wget won't allow the javascript to run. wget is ok for small and medium stores, but large stores can't take advantage of the cron wget automated method.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Are there any other programs besides wget that can be used for this? The drawback of wget is it dies if you use javascript to refresh the screen. The screen is refreshed just before the miva global timeout when there are large databases. But wget won't allow the javascript to run. wget is ok for small and medium stores, but large stores can't take advantage of the cron wget automated method.

I'm not aware of any command line web request engine that will honor javascript refreshes or meta refreshes. Probably the only reliable way to accomplish a refresh of that nature would be for the module to output absolutely nothing when called in cron job mode and then issue an http header 301 redirect to the next screen when it nears the timeout; command line browsers do tend to honor redirects issued at the http level.

[titus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

As far as I know, most (all?) CLI based browsers don't run javascript. This may be able to be accomplished via some heavy integration with xvfb. But that could also be stretching it a bit. I'm not sure. I have some self-hosted monitoring systems that I have developed, which use xvfb to pull in the x-window basics so I can run browsers with Javascript in them, from a CRON. The only issue with this is that I've had to write proprietary browser plugins to accomplish the Javascript running.

I highly doubt that hosting companies are going to go the extra mile to allow this. This would be something that would more than likely be a dedicated service from someone running a VPS.

[wcw]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Well that is an interesting solution. Now if I could just get some free time to work on that idea.

[wcw]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

the module to output absolutely nothing when called in cron job mode and then issue an http header 301 redirect to the next screen when it nears the timeout

Therein lies the problem. The module runs in admin in the utilities section. While we have control of that screen, admin.mvc is inserting doctype and html tag at the beginning. Hence, it would have to be run either 1) as a standalone mivascript or 2) as a component in merchant.mvc. If the admin.mvc would have worked, it would have been a half hour project. Looks like it will be a bit more involved.

[titus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Therein lies the problem. The module runs in admin in the utilities section. While we have control of that screen, admin.mvc is inserting doctype and html tag at the beginning. Hence, it would have to be run either 1) as a standalone mivascript or 2) as a component in merchant.mvc. If the admin.mvc would have worked, it would have been a half hour project. Looks like it will be a bit more involved.

I'm not very well versed in Miva Module creation yet, but isn't there a way to capture the output in a buffer before it's sent to the browser? If it can't be done in Miva, then it should be possible to do via .htaccess

I've done that with .htaccess for inserting Google Analytics on a site with 15,000 HTML pages (no CMS.. all different markup) without changing any of the pages.

I think you should be able to do something similar in concept if Miva won't allow you to buffer output and manipulate it before it gets sent out.

[Geographicus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Getting back to the original question. By adding the wget command I actually got the Power Search cron to run regularly. However, I cannot seem to get the template data feed cron to kick in.

Any ideas:

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=exprodf&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx&P rovision=yes&Submit=Login&ExProdF_report=11&includ e_status=A&ExProdF_Custom_Fields=1&ExProdF_UI=modu les/ui/mmui.mvc' --no-check-certificate -O - 'https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

[Geographicus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

And no, there are no spaces in the actual code, thoses seem to be aded when I copy and past it here.

Also, I have tried removing the "s" form http but that doens't work either.

[titus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

So, just to clarify -- you can run the wget command now without an error? For example, if you were to do:

wget http://example.com/index.html

would wget fetch the page?

[titus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Maybe change it to this:

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=powrsrch&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx& Provision=yes&Submit=Login&powrsrch_rebuild=777777 7&powrsrch_fulltext=name,descrip' --no-check-certificate -O -'https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

I updated the http://www.geographicus.com/mm5/admin.mvc to match the https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc in the other job.

There was a redirect happening in the background. I don't know if that would have an affect, but always try and remove as many variables as possible when troubleshooting.

[Geographicus]

Re: Power Serach, Template Data Feed, Cron Jobs and Plesk

Yes, wget works - or at least it works with this code to run Power Search:

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=exprodf&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx&P rovision=yes&Submit=Login&ExProdF_report=11&includ e_status=A&ExProdF_Custom_Fields=1&ExProdF_UI=modu les/ui/mmui.mvc' --no-check-certificate -O - 'https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

however it does not work with this code which i was using to run Template Data Feed before Plesk:

wget -q --post-data='Screen=SUTL&Action=SUTL&Store_Code=AntiqueMa ps&Module_Code=exprodf&UserName=xxx&Password=xxx&P rovision=yes&Submit=Login&ExProdF_report=11&includ e_status=A&ExProdF_Custom_Fields=1&ExProdF_UI=modu les/ui/mmui.mvc' --no-check-certificate -O - 'https://geographicus.cybrhost.com/mm5/admin.mvc' > /dev/null

Kevin