Sometimes you fight with a computer and sometimes it fights back, but who wins. Don’t you just hate it when your computer decides (remember, it has a mind of it’s own) to stop working properly for no reason whatsoever? I just spent the bulk of my morning trying to fix something that had worked fine for some time, but all of sudden stopped working. What is the reason? That is the question.
There is always a reason, but us techies act too quickly sometimes. We just try to “fix” the issue quick, because we would rather be doing other things. I was caught up in such a situation this morning. Unfortunately when we try to fix these things we get stuck in the vicious cycle of reinstalling whatever it is that is “broken”. The underlieing issue goes unseen when we simply un-install and re-install the broken piece of the mysterious computer.
Then the beauty of Linux and open source becomes apparent again. Having access to the source code and being able to change whatever you want allows one quite a bit of control. So I popped open the source code for the thing that was “broke” and found exactly where in the code it was failing. I was then able to see that it was at a higher level and not in the program itself (which is really strange though, because it appeared to work at the higher level. Hmm… a bit more digging)
It was Friday, and I decided to postpone trying to fix the issue. Hopefully when I take a fresh look at it again, it will be an easy fix. I know I didn’t mention what “it” was that was broken, but it doesn’t really matter.
Until next time…
[UPDATE]
I went back and looked at the issue with a fresh mind, and it turned out to be a 30 second fix. So all that I did was in vein. At least I’ll know for next time!
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