Fiddler - Daily stop start - scheduled-tasks

What is the best way to stop/start Fiddler as a daily task?
I am usin Fiddler to monitor/logs https trafficon machine which runs fully automated and runs software which is not controlled by me, but uses https.
My machine stopped yesterday because Fiddler went out of memory after running over 3 days and now I want to have a clean way to start/stop it.
I guess I could just specify a process duration in the task manager, but I would prefer something cleaner, especially to avoid issues when things are started manually.

Just use Scheduled Tasks, they have been part of windows since forever. You should be able to stop fiddler with it too (by calling TaskKill).

Related

The HTTP request to the remote WebDriver server timed out after 60 seconds. Happens only when running through the task scheduler

I'm troubleshooting an Selenium script that runs through the Task Scheduler on a Windows Server. It's running in PowerShell using version 3.0.1 of the Selenium module (found here:https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Selenium/3.0.1) with the Edge browser (the one with Chromium).
The "The HTTP request to the remote WebDriver server for URL [localhost] timed out after 60 seconds." error has been quite persistent and only appears when run through the Task Scheduler. The script runs fine when running manually through ISE.
Also to note, there's another script that is more or less the same as the one having the issue, albeit using a slightly different url (same site). This second script runs without issue through the task scheduler. They're performing the same sequence of actions which is why I'm not entirely sure why it would fail for one script but not the other.
I haven't found a suitable solution while looking at other posters facing the same issue. Any help is much appreciated!
I had the same issue. I tried all kinds of code changes but the only step that worked for me was to change the Security Options in Task Scheduler.
Task (right-click) > Properties > General > Switch from Run whether user is logged on or not to Run only when the user is logged on.
I guess this would be a temporary solution. I'll keep looking and update this if I find a better solution.

How to restart an exe when it is exits in windows 10?

I have a process in windows which i am running in startup. Now i need to make it if somehow that process get killed or stopped i need to restart it again in Windows 10?
Is there any way. Process is a HTTP server which if somehow stopped in windows i need to restart it. I have tried of writing a power-shell in which I'll check task-list status of process and then if not found I'll restart but that is not a good way. Please suggest some good way to do it.
I have a golang exe; under a particular scenario my process got killed or stopped i need to start it up again automatically. This has to be done imediately after the exe got killed. What is the best way to achieve this?
I will give you a brief rundown. You can enable Audit Process Termination in local group policy of the machine as shown below. In your case, success audits would be enough. Please note that the pic is for Windows 7. It may change with OS.
Now every time a process gets terminated, a success event will be generated and written to the security eventlog.
This will allow you to create a task scheduler that triggers on the generation of this event that calls a script that would run the process again. Simple right?
Well, you might have some trouble setting that task up especially when you want to pass details about the generating event to the script. This should help you get through that.
You can user Task scheduler for this purpose. There is a option of "restart on failure" which can be selected and whenever your process get failed it will restart again.
Reference :- https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/4545361c-cc1f-4505-a0a1-c2dcc094109a/restarting-scheduled-task-that-has-failed?forum=winserverManagement

FlowForce - monitoring and alerting tool

I had to configure AppDynamics alerts in the past for Java applications I worked for.
I also heard of Nagios, but I am not very sure how that works.
Now, I need to configure alerts for a FlowForce Server, but I don't believe it can be integrated with AppDynamics or Nagios.
I saw FlowForce allow me to send some alerts, like when a step of a job fails, but I would like to have some server alerts, like, for instance, if the license expires and, as a result, the server is automatically shut down.
I am wondering the best way to achieve it.
I am running it on a Windows environment BTW.
Suggestions are welcome.
Thank you in advance!
I found my answer on the Flow Force online help (https://manual.altova.com/flowforceserver/flowforceserver/)
The Flow Force is deployed as two servers, which in a window env, can be started and stopped as windows services (can be found via "Control Panel">"Administrative Tools">Services). With this information, I can monitor them via NAGIOS.

Running Fiddler as a scheduled task. Traffic not captured

I have a machine setup to run automated tests. I have some software, including Fiddler running as scheduled tasks on start up without user required to log in.
But tests fail, since traffic is not going through Fiddler. When I log in to that machine, I can see in Task Manager Fiddler running as background process.
I've tried starting the task as my user and as System.
Trying to figure out how to have traffic go through that fiddler instance. Thank you!
4/27 Update
So it had to do with the user that scheduled task was set to run from. After playing with it, I figured my user was set incorrectly. Now it looks like traffic goes through Fiddler, as tests are passing. But nowhere I can see the traffic. Fiddler is running as background process and I can't find the folder where it stores temp files. I have also tried setting autosave to a file every 5 minutes. And while it works when I run fiddler in UI, no sessions are saved when it runs as background process.

Scheduled Tasks for Web Applications

What are the different approaches for creating scheduled tasks for web applications, with or without a separate web/desktop application?
If we're talking Microsoft platform, then I'd always develop a separate Windows Service to handle such batch tasks.
You can always reference the same assemblies that are being used by your web application to avoid any nasty code duplication.
Jeff discussed this on the Stack Overflow blog -
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/
Basically, Jeff proposed using the CacheItemRemovedCallback as a timer for calling certain tasks.
I personally believe that automated tasks should be handled as a service, a Windows scheduled task, or a job in SQL Server.
Under Linux, checkout cron.
I think Stack Overflow itself is using an ApplicationCache expiration to run background code at intervals.
If you're on a Linux host, you'll almost certainly be using cron.
Under linux you can use cron jobs (http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html) to schedule tasks.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
I think Windows' built-in Task Scheduler is the suggested tool for this job. That requires an outside application.
This may or may not be what you're looking for, but read this article, "Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs". I think StackOverflow may use this method or it was at least talked about using it.
A very simple method that we've used where I work is this:
Set up a webservice/web method that executes the task. This webservice can be secured with username/pass if desired.
Create a console app that calls this web service. If desired, you can have the console app send parameters and/or get back some sort of metrics for output to the console or external logging.
Schedule this executable in the task scheduler of choice.
It's not pretty, but it is simple and reliable. Since the console app is essentially just a heartbeat to tell the app to go do its work, it does not need to share any libraries with the application. Another plus of this methodology is that it's fairly trivial to kick off manually when needed.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
You can also tell cron to run php scripts directly, for example. And you can set the permissions on the PHP file to prevent other people accessing them or better yet, don't have these utility scripts in a web accessible directory...
Java and Spring -- Use quartz. Very nice and reliable -- http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/reference/scheduling.html
I think there are easier ways than using cron (Linux) or Task Scheduler (Windows). You can build this into your web-app using:
(a) quartz scheduler,
or if you don't want to integrate another 3rd party library into your application:
(b) create a thread on startup which uses the standard Java 'java.util.Timer' class to run your tasks.
I recently worked on a project that does exactly this (obviously it is an external service but I thought I would share).
https://anticipated.io/
You can receive a webhook or an SQS event at a specific scheduled time. Dealing with these schedulers can be a pain so I thought I'd share in such case someone is looking to offload their concerns.