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

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Thu Mar 15 03:11:14 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 14 March 2007, Jason Spiro wrote:
> 2007/3/14, Rob Sutherland <rob-3Aypa9sX/B7wvR0lvYjcXw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > I think the key point is that it's easy to find an (or several)
> > *answers* via
> > google, but finding the right *question* is the real problem. If
> > you can work
> > out the exact question that fits your problem, finding the
> > correct answer, whether
> > by  using google  or reading the code or whatever  becomes much
> > easier. Your
> > problem solving process should drive your use of google  not the
> > other way round.
>
> 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.

Error messages can be misleading. For example, I just had a problem 
where a Django site was throwing an exception when I attempted to 
save a new object on the production server, which is using Apache and 
mod_python, whereas the development server, which uses the built-in 
http server, worked fine. The exception was "cannot concatenate 'str' 
and 'tuple' objects". I wasn't really trying to do that of course. I 
was trying to concatenate two strings. In dev, that worked because I 
really was concatenating two strings. In production, one of the 
objects which I expected to be a string was indeed a tuple. It turned 
out to be a permissions problem, not an error in the code. Well, not 
quite. It was both. Apache didn't have enough permission to be able 
to write to a file. The error in the code was that the exception was 
deliberately being thrown away so while it should have halted at the 
point where the process didn't have enough privileges to write to a 
file, it didn't, which passed an exception tuple object to the 
concatenation. There is no way that a Google search would have 
revealed the problem no matter how much I might have wished it so.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
--
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





More information about the Legacy mailing list