Advanced Tools

Cron Jobs

We recommend that only reasonably advanced users consider using this option. 

The cron job option provides two alternative web interfaces to the crontab program which allow you to set up cron jobs to run in your account. A cron job is a script which is set up to run automatically at a given "time". For example, a cron job may be set up to run at a particular time of the day, day of the week, date of the month, or even to run a given number of minutes into each hour. Scripts like this can be useful for taking care of various "housekeeping" tasks for your account such as deleting out of date log files created by a CGI script. 

Please don't set up a cron job to run extremely frequently (e.g. every minute) without first checking with support as, depending on the script being run, this may use excessive server resources. 

If you choose to use the Unix Style interface then, as for a normal 24 hour digital clock, minutes run from 0 to 59 and hours run from 0 (midnight) to 23 (11 PM). Days of the week run from 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday). As you would expect, days of the month run from 1 to 31 and months of the year run from 1 to 12. If you set the day of the month to 31, the script will be executed on the last day of the month, whether the month has 31 days or not. 

Instead of specifying a particular hour, day or month for your script to run, you can use an asterisk (*) to indicate that the script should be run every hour, day and/or month.

Networking Tools

The Trace Route utility shows the path on the web that information travels in order to get from the server to your ISP and the time taken to reach each point along the way. This can be useful for troubleshooting network problems such as a suspected delay or loss of data somewhere on route.