I’ve finally retired the old cron + sh setup for the weather bots. It served us well, but it had a major flaw: if I rebooted the server while it was posting, the job just died halfway. If the server was down during a scheduled slot, the forecast was lost forever.

So, I wrote a custom Python daemon to run inside the FreeBSD Jails.

• It’s stateful now. If a crash happens at city 15 of 50, it resumes exactly there on reboot.

• If the server naps/is rebooting during a scheduled run, the bot realizes it missed a slot and runs immediately upon waking up.