Years and Years and Years of experience..

[Furmanek, Greg]

<snip>
-> Another example - at work last week the admins reformatted the
-> hard drive on my Ultra5 and started over, because it needed some
-> repartitioning anyway.  (Suns have this neat firmware 
-> feature that allows them to install a complete filesystem
-> via the network; no mucking around with boot disks.)  Afterwards
-> I could no longer ftp into the system.  I scratched my head for
-> a while, checked everything I could think of, and had to ask an
-> admin for help (which is a little embarrassing, because I've 
-> been the 
-> thorn in their sides many times for being control freaks, 
-> and espoused
-> the viewpoint that a software engineer should have root on his
-> own box, for crying out loud.)  

Agreed.

-> The problem was that my shell is
-> bash, and ftp only accepts connections for users whose shells are
-> "blessed" as being OK, by having them listed in /etc/shells.  
-> (The admins all use korn shell, the masochists, so they don't have
-> this problem.)  (And if korn shell can do command history, filename
-> completion etc. they don't know how... which makes me wonder why
-> they keep putting up with it.  But by golly, freeware is 
-> untrustworthy so they won't use it, and they begrudge me using it too.)  

I use both, and they both have a lot of great feature. history is 
one of them.

-> the admin remembered how to fix this problem, and I didn't, despite 
-> the fact that it had occurred about a year ago and was fixed the 
-> same way; so for him it only took a minute to fix, and I would have 
-> been taking a lot of guesses and trying things to see what works, or 
-> trying to find useful error messages in log files, if it'd been me.  
-> Or maybe something would have jogged my memory, hard to say.  The 
-> problem was trivial but not all people are good at memorizing little 
-> details like this.

Ok, I have to admint when I was making the comment about solving 
the problems in 5 minutes I was more thinking about problems 
which occure in software construction.  I was not considering
fixing problems associated with specific functionality of a 
specific program.

<snip>

-> Well I guess if you are that organized as to be able to find old
-> notes so fast, it would help.  (Which reminds me I should put some
-> features into nettebook to facilitate it.)

I am not as organized as I would like to be however find and grep 
work pretty good and I do take a lot of notes with my projects.

The Wolf