Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

Yes, I realize my title gives away the topic of this post, but so be it. Surely when you read the title you thought to yourself — “Oh no, he’s gone and done it now! He has searched a Unix error message on Google for a remedy! What a fool!” And you would be spot on, as you always are.

Surely those among you who have been a reluctant sys admin have done the same thing. Maybe sendmail is being a pain, or the cool new package you just downloaded won’t compile. Who knows what your problem might be. But you say to yourself: “I know, a quick search with this exact error message will certainly turn up a solution!” Right, and pigs fly.

Three hours later you are no closer to a solution, but you have delved much deeper into all the various Unix distros than you ever care to. But don’t worry, this isn’t a diatribe against Unix so much as it is about the state of searching for solutions to technical problems that have multiple possible causes, many different potential contributing factors, and an untold number of possible software combinations. In other words, you are royally screwed but you just haven’t admitted it yet.

It’s actually kind of charming, this idea that you are only one well-crafted Google search away from the solution. Naive, really, but charming.

Perhaps I’ve stumbled on a good business model — a site where you can put in some basic information such as whether you’re running Natty Narwhal or Roy’s Ruckus (hey, a guy can dream), the versions of key infrastructure pieces (Apache, MySQL, etc.), and perhaps some other config info as well as the error message and get back a debugging strategy. Heck, I’d probably even pay for such a site.

So yeah, if it already exists let me know. Meanwhile, I have to get back to sifting through the 8th page of the Google results on my error message of the week. That’s right, despite Dante’s admonition I haven’t yet abandoned all hope. Call me stupid — or desperate.