Thanks! I will pass it along and hopefully we can push for a change. I can’t guarantee that anything will happen in the short term, but at the very least we can create some bad publicity for them.

I’m mildly autistic, to the point I do have to put on a “face” and try to act “normal” in social situations. I am generally quite sociable and outgoing, so I don’t feel it’s held me back. It’s just different.

Both socially and through work I interact with a diverse range of people, and I don’t think I am any more different than a British person is from an Italian. I’ve taken the mindset that if someone has a problem with that difference, it’s merely an excuse for their bigotry that would’ve surfaced for a different reason either way.

On the flip side, it’s been incredibly helpful in my career. I have an affinity for processes and an analytical brain, as well as the ability to disconnect from any discussion emotionally. I have always felt that this stems from my autism and it’s allowed me to have business discussions about difficult topics while leaving Ego at the proverbial door.

So I would say that for me in particular, it’s been a positive. Someone having a problem with me being different is just that; their problem, not mine.

Hey Op, since you appear to be somewhere in the EU based on your mention of Euro pricing, would you be willing to name and shame the wheelchair manufacturer and/or model?

Without giving too much of my own personal information away, I might be in a position to cause a bit of ruckus for this particular company in terms of bad PR, possibly legislatively. I work for a company that profiles itself on doing this stuff “the right way” (secure practises, not screwing users this way, etc) and we are working on building a list of practises we are hoping to root out EU-Wide with some examples that are clearly exploitative.

I need nothing personally identifiable, just the brand and model, and I can pass it along to the team that can investigate further.

Everyone else is just telling you to do things in a way that is different, and while they are correct (you should use a unit.d/systems script for this depending on your distro), I’m going to actually answer your question since I know sometimes you just need a quick and simple way.

Depending on your version of cron, it may support special statements instead of the * * * * * notation for time.

The one you want is @reboot. Replace all entries of the schedule syntax with that, including the @, and the command will be executed only once when the system boots up.

Use that to start a script that checks for network connectivity on a loop with a sleep statement. Break the loop when you have connectivity, then execute your command, and exit the script.

Don’t ignore the correct way though. You’re better off executing this as a systemd (or equivalent) script. It’s barely more effort, and has the benefit of some nice built in logging and integrations.

I have some bad news…

My tried-and-tested method has saved my (company’s clients) ass a few times.

Every Mysql/MariaDB server has at least one replication target. This replicant is not used for access by the infra, and can be paused, restarted, etc with no issue and is configured with this in mind.

We run a mysqldump on the replicant. Depending on the resiliency required, we store the dump on the replicant and/or a third location.

The tools differ, but the practice applies to pretty much every database system and the database has the benefit of not being interrupted during the backup (replication is paused during the backup, and resumed after completion). This also has the benefit of already having replication configured, and adding a secondary redundant instance you can swap out for the master (or using the backup replicant in a pinch) means disaster recovery is much faster.

Also, I dislike many things about Azure’s offerings, but their Flexible Database for MySQL does the above for you as one nicely packaged solution for a reasonable-but-not-cheap price.