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Trouble shooting

We perceive troubles when we feel negatively classified sensations. To have any sensation, there must be resistances and/or frictions.

Without resistances and frictions, we will feel nothing and no troubles. But I think it can only happen when we are totally dead.

Living is moving, and moving is having resistances and frictions and feeling them. And some sensations will be classified as "negative" no matter how hard you try.

So, it's quite normal to have troubles in our life. Otherwise, we are dead.

However, some troubles can be eliminated (or replaced by other one).

• Trouble shooting methods

  There are many ways to solve problems.

  Just waiting, for example, is often pretty effective way of trouble shooting, even for technical matter.

  Because some problems are temporal/sporadic in nature, and it will disappear with the time.

  Some of them would never come up again, while others may reappear ...

But waiting isn't good enough when we encounter persistent or regular problems.

• Knowing possibilities

  When you start trouble shooting, you shouldn't limit yourself.

  There are so many possibilities in this world that the problem can be caused by virtually anything, to start with.

  Among these infinite possible causes, you can pick up and examine most probable causes, and continue narrowing down until you have definitive answer.

Easily frustrated person has a common tendency of clinging on to only one possible cause among many, and keep blaming/accusing/cursing it without accepting any other possibilities.

No wonder he/she gets frustrated.

I guess these type of people love to get frustrated and blame someone else, insisting that they are the victims and that they deserve more attentions and special treatments, and hoping someone else will take care of them, rather than finding solution and fixing the problem by their own initiatives.

Many human being can slip back temporary to this "crying baby" state, under emotional stress, confusion, or shock.

If you feel that you are frustrated, take a slow easy deep breath, feel the pain, and get out of the victim attitude, blaming mind frame.

As long as you stay in it, you won't be truly happy, and it prevents you from doing effective trouble shooting.

Example of endless, infernal, victim attitude ping-pong loop ==> Middle eastern conflict

• Where to suspect

  If we are talking about problems related to Internet, it can be caused by:

  1. Home/Office machine
  2. Router/Modem
  3. ISP
  4. Upper ISP(s)
  5. Service provider (such as hosting company)

To know the possible causes:

1. Read FAQ, Forums, ML, Readme, Manual, and related materials
2. Run Google search. Search FAQ, Forums
3. Check the home page of the software/system.
4. Contact the author/vendor.

• Gather the data

  Without symptoms or other data indicating the causes, it's nearly impossible to do logical well organized trouble shooting.

  Error messages are often telling exact causes, and we just have to read it.

  Surprisingly, there are so many people who pay NO attention to error messages.

Sometime, you may have to do look for the error messages in error_log, or activate certain option in the software, or add some code to be able to see error messages.

It'll help you a lot if you learn the effective way to get messages from each software/system you are using.

In case of software, redirecting stderr output to stdout or a file is easy way to see the messages.

When you are using/testing programs in the environment that doesn't show stderr (Standard error output), you may have to add a bit of code.

(Apache's error_log may record error messages, in case of CGI)

If it's a shellscript this will redirect stderr to stdout for all following commands.

exec 2>1&

In Perl, this will do that.

open(STDERR,">&STDOUT");

Alternatively, you may want to do like this:

begin {

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; # In case of CGI script

open(STDERR,">&STDOUT");

}

In Python:

import sys

sys.stderr = sys.stdout

As componets, modules, libraries, and other part of system maybe telling us about the problem, we should know how to get these messages.

For CGI/PHP problem, check web server's error log.

PowWeb users can use EasyLogTool to see the error_log.

Also, try nph-debug.cgi to get better idea.

For redirect related problem, use proper tools.

• List up possible causes

  Now, we gathered information, we can list up possible causes, and start eliminating them.

  Sometime, the information is pointing something very obvious and we don't have to do this.

• Testing

  We should know how to test to confirm if the suspected cause is really the one we are looking for.

  And we are going to test multiple configurateions to see the differences in among the results.

• Fix

  Apply the fix determined by the testing and test again to be sure.

Trouble Shooting RewriteRule

These tools will help you, too.

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