When lolz turn to sadness

My current employment is as the Co-op student for ITS Desktop Support, the only major project so far has been the rebuilding of the department's internal website in a more interactive, database driven format. The new version of the site is being hosted in RIT's new totally redone better-than-the-old-environment-ever-could-have-been web applications environment. Despite the rather cramped space limitation, and unnecessary staging server, it's been less painful than it could be. Until I got around to porting a few of our backend processes that need to run on a regular basis. This involves command line PHP and UNIX Cron. Which would normally be well and good but this environment is really more than meets the eye.
In short, developing in it is like trying to get from point A to point B in this room:
It took a day to get database connections, because for some reason scripts run by Cron run on a DIFFERENT HOST than scripts run manually from the command line or scripts run by the browser. WHAT?!!!

These people have obviously never heard of the principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. So when any of these points of failure go down, the whole system dies. I found this out over the weekend. Because it went down.
Every 5 minutes my cron task ran, and every 5 minutes it failed. Which meant that every 5 minutes, I got an e-mail saying that there was a problem running the script, and then another e-mail saying the script failed. I was greeted Saturday morning by well over 100 e-mails.

Remember, don't laugh at the convolution of your development environment, for it might come back and pee in your shoes.

:(


--PXA