Scheduled task problem, Windows Server 2008 R2

[Carson Dyle]

I have a scheduled task on my home network's Window Server 2008 R2 file server that runs a batch file which uses the curl utility to retrieve a remote PDF document. The document is the front page of a newspaper, posted daily to newseum.org. The document is placed online any time between about 4AM and 1PM or so, so I run the task every 15 minutes and the batch file exits if the page has already been retrieved. I save the file to a local Dropbox folder, so that I can view it from my other computers.

What is happening is that the document is not being saved to the Dropbox folder until I remotely log on to the server using RDP. It appears to have already been retrieved, since the file's modtime varies and is typically many hours old. For example, at about 11AM today looked in the Dropbox folder for today's newspaper. It wasn't there, so I RDP'd into the server. It then immediately showed up in the Dropbox folder with a timestamp of 6:15AM.

I run the scheduled task as a user who is a system Administrator. I have 'Run whether user is logged on or not' and 'Run with highest privileges' both checked. It also stores the user's password.

Any ideas what may be going on?

 

[jolancer]

Only related experience i have is with winXP schedualed tasks, so not sure if it relates. but...

If its at all similar, perhaps it's the permissions on your dropbox directory? IDK about WinServer but with XP, accounts with admin privledges doesn't mean it can access any folder it wan't on the system.

note i'm not familiar with dropbox or if theres special permissions that go along with that to begin with. but in XP the security settings im refering to are... RightClickFolder/Properties/Security/Advanced

It may need FolderOptions/View/SimpleFileSharing = Disabled

WinServer may differ tho ofcourse

 

[Carson Dyle]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. I have the Dropbox folder on the server located at C:\Dropbox, rather than the default location within a user profile. That folder has very lax security, with Administrators, Users, Everyone and SYSTEM all having Full control.

And the user that I RDP into the server with is the same one used for the scheduled task, so I'm not sure how that would trip anything related to folder permissions.

 

[debian0001]

You might want to give PowerShell a try, it might work out better.

http://teusje.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/download-file-with-powershell/