Scheduled Tasks won’t run in DNN 7.3.0

If you’ve recently upgraded to DotNetNuke 7.3, you might not have noticed that your scheduled tasks aren’t running. How do you know if your tasks are running or not? Follow these steps

1. Login with a super user account (typically HOST)
2. Navigate to the Host/Schedule page from within the Control Panel’s Host menu
3. Pick a task that is enabled, and click on the Icon in the LOG column
4. On the schedule history page that loads, see if the task has started/ended at all since you upgraded to DNN 7.3

If you find that the schedule tasks haven’t been running since you upgraded to DNN 7.3 than you are likely experiencing the bug that was introduced. Long story short of the bug is that the Server Name in the schedule is now case sensitive, and you likely have Upper Case server names in the WebServers table in the database.

Initially, before I realized it was a case sensitivity issue I performed the followings steps to get my schedule running again.

1. Update the name of the server in the Web Servers table to be SERVERNAME-2 instead of SERVERNAME
2. Restart the Application Pool in IIS

This caused DNN to add a new server entry into the web servers table, and thus the scheduled tasks started firing off correctly.

I believe, though I haven’t tested this myself, you could simply take the following two steps to get this fixed

1. Rename your webserver in the webservers table to be lowercase
2. Restart the Application Pool in IIS

There also appears to be another bug in the web server infrastructure for scheduling related to duplicate web servers listed in the table, though I haven’t experienced that on my sites, I would assume that it would be possible to have the upper and lowercase variants of the server name in the table and perhaps that causes some DNN issues.

I believe that both of these are being worked on for the DNN 7.3.1 release, though I have no clue when that release will be made available.