Why do weekly tasks created via PowerShell using a different user fail with error 0x41306

Posted by Danny Tuppeny on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Danny Tuppeny
Published on 2013-01-17T14:38:58Z Indexed on 2014/08/22 4:22 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 531

We have some scripts that create scheduled jobs using PowerShell as part of our application. When testing them recently, I noticed that some of them always failed immediately, and no output is ever produced (they don't even appear in the Get-Job list).

After many days of tweaking, we've managed to isolate it to any jobs that are set to run weekly. Below is a script that creates two jobs that do exactly the same thing. When we run this on our domain, and provide credentials of a domain user, then force both jobs to run in the Task Scheduler GUI (right-click -> Run), the daily one runs fine (0x0 result) and the weekly one fails (0x41306).

Note: If I don't provide the -Credential param, both jobs work fine. The jobs only fail if the task is both weekly, and running as this domain user.

I can't find information on why this is happening, nor think of any reason it would behave differently for weekly jobs. The "History£ tab in the Task Scheduler has almost no useful information, just "Task stopping due to user request" and "Task terminated", both of which have no useful info:

Task Scheduler terminated "{eabba479-f8fc-4f0e-bf5e-053dfbfe9f62}" instance of the "\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs\Test1" task. Task Scheduler stopped instance "{eabba479-f8fc-4f0e-bf5e-053dfbfe9f62}" of task "\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs\Test1" as request by user "MyDomain\SomeUser" .

What's up with this? Why do weekly tasks run differently, and how can I diganose this issue?

This is PowerShell v3 on Windows Server 2008 R2. I've been unable to reproduce this locally, but I don't have a user set up in the same way as the one in our production domain (I'm working on this, but I wanted to post this ASAP in the hope someone knows what's happening!).

Import-Module PSScheduledJob

$Action =
{
    "Executing job!"
}

$cred = Get-Credential "MyDomain\SomeUser"

# Remove previous versions (to allow re-running this script)
Get-ScheduledJob Test1 | Unregister-ScheduledJob
Get-ScheduledJob Test2 | Unregister-ScheduledJob

# Create two identical jobs, with different triggers
Register-ScheduledJob "Test1" -ScriptBlock $Action -Credential $cred -Trigger (New-JobTrigger -Weekly -At 1:25am -DaysOfWeek Sunday)
Register-ScheduledJob "Test2" -ScriptBlock $Action -Credential $cred -Trigger (New-JobTrigger -Daily -At 1:25am)

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about windows-server-2008-r2

Related posts about powershell