You Know It Is Going To Be A Good Day When…

You know it’s going to be a good day when you spend 30 minutes debugging a problem which ultimately ends up being a one character typo, an extra ‘p’, in /etc/exports:

/export/rippper *(ro)

That’s something you just don’t see unless you’re really looking for it.

My best screwup yet[0] was a few years back. I’d reported a problem with compiling Python on AIX 4.3.3. The Python guys got back to me and told me that they didn’t have AIX boxes, so if it was going to get fixed I had to do it. So I set about changing the autoconf/configure scripts to do the right thing.

I had two terminal windows open, one where I was editing, one where I was testing. I’d make a change, and then run ‘configure’ to test. Nothing I did changed anything — it looked like my changes were being ignored.

Absolutely perplexed, I beat my head against it for about an hour until I realized those two windows were SSHed to two different machines – the server I discovered the problem on and my test server. Obviously changing one didn’t change the other…. *sigh* That’s an hour of my life I’m never getting back.

[0] Well, screwups that didn’t hose machines & services, at least.