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March 2, 2006
Step 0: Insure The Unit is Plugged-in
A colleague, who I consider generally bright, spent "all day" debugging a problem with a PHP script that was behaving strangely making LDAP calls.
"Did you make sure PHP was compiled with the LDAP module?" I asked.
"I'm way past that" was his response.
He described his troubleshooting steps, which seemed reasonable, so I returned to my office with a promise that I'd drop him an IM if I found anything interesting.
When I got there, I IM'd the guy who admins the server that the code was running on, asking him for an account with shell access. Sure enough, the php-ldap module wasn't installed.
There's a lesson here. Always check the simple things before you start digging. Once you've checked the simplest thing, check the next, and the next, and methodically proceed until you've found the problem. It may take a while - the problem may, in fact, be deep, but many problems aren't - and you've got a much better chance of finding what you're looking for with a plan.
Finding a needle in a haystack is simple - it just takes a long time. (Assuming you can't just torch the haystack and sift the ashes...)
Oh, the colleague? He gave up for the day moments before I made my discovery, so I'll have to wait 'till tomorrow to find out if I was right.
Posted by dberger at March 2, 2006 8:22 PM