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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 06:25:45PM -0400, Jason Spiro wrote:
> Last summer, a coworker of mine was a software package tester who used
> to be an auto mechanic.  He noted I turn to Google a lot for help with
> problems.  He said it was important to know how to troubleshoot
> without any help from the Web, or mailing lists, or anywhere: to know
> how to track down problems by logical troubleshooting steps.
> 
> Is this true?  How important is it, really, to know how to
> troubleshoot independently?

I believe in learning from the mistakes (and successes) of others, so I
highly believe in searching for other peoples opinions and attemps and
solutions to a problem on google.  After all I could spend a day trying
to find the solution, find something I think works, but by checking what
others did I could have found out that it in fact does not solve the
problem, but only masks it and that the real problem is somewhere else
and what the solution is.  Doing a check of what others have tried can
also help give me ideas for places to look that I might consider
obviously not the problem, which then turn out to be the problem.

So perhaps it is true when fixing cars (I don't think so either though,
given I once brought in my car with a problem, which the dealership
couldn't fix, but a 5 minute google search on the symptoms told me what
the problem is, which the dealership could then easily check for and
fix).

Some people seem to think it looks bad to ask for help/directions/etc,
and believe they are a better person if they do it all by themselves.  I
don't.  I believe in using all the tools I have.  After all what is the
difference between using google as a tool and using grep to find a file
containing a string?  I could just cat each file and look at the screen
to see if it contains the string.  Why not do that instead of relying on
something else to do all the boring work for me?

--
Len Sorensen
--
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