“I don’t have Internet access at home.” What a terrible thing to hear! It is so sad when people tell me that the only way they check their email is by visiting public, community-sponsored, unprotected venues like the library. Internet access is almost as essential as utilities. When my sister informed me that she didn’t subscribe to Internet in her apartment complex because it was too expensive, I compared that to having no running water at home. Its like she hasn’t bathed since she moved in!
Taking pity, I set out to solve her dilemma. Luckily, the great thing about living in an apartment complex is that you are usually surrounded by a neighborhood of trusting technology dummies. At least 5 open wireless signals will abound everywhere … except where you need them the most, in your room. The only place that I could detect a signal was next to the kitchen window. Sadly, it would be too cluttered (and too trashy) to move the computer in the kitchen. However, we could bring the Internet connection to us in the computer room.
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Has this situation ever happened to you? You enter search keywords in Google for a very specific topic. In the resulting screen, you see the title of that perfect article with exactly what you were seeking. Hopeful, you click the link and receive a 404-error message saying that the page does not exist. This scenario sadly happens to everyone countless times. Fortunately, there are two ways to view these once accessible pages.
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As a hacker, I have to program my remote web server to automatically perform routine tasks for me. It’s a whole lot easier and cheaper to rely on my web hosting company to manage an always-on server. For starters, I don’t have to pay for the 24/7 electricity the on-call technician!
To make the server perform an automated task in a Linux or Unix environment, you need to schedule a cron job. I won’t go through all the details of setting it up in shell terminal since most people do not have remote shell access. You can read about the details more at the cron and crontab Wikipedia articles. Most of us deal with an interface on the cPanel that looks kind of like one of these two screens.
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