Troubleshooting without help from others (was: Failed to open control device /dev/em8300-0)

[Rob Sutherland]

Jason Spiro wrote:
>
> I'm curious: Can you elaborate on what you just said / give an example
> of a case or two where you needed to know the right question?  As far
> as I can remember, generally when I search google for help with
> technical problems/bugs I have an error message onscreen.  I just
> enter those into google.
>
Yeah and for a lot of problems that will work, that's what I do too,
but if the problem causing the error message is  caused by another 
problem that's caused by another problem etc. google won't necessarily
help you especially if the visible problem can have many possible causes
and/or is in a area that doesn't get googlized much such as large  private
code bases etc.

Ok, the other day I couldn't ssh into a server - I googled the error and it
said that the server dropped the connection. When  I went in I found that
the server was out of disk space, caused by a runaway process filling up a
log file, which was caused by a combination of a faulty configuration setup
and about 6 other things. If you only have one domino falling, google is
very useful, if you have more, it's still useful but you have to go through
the process to narrow things down.


Rob
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists