[Techtalk] Debugging/ Troubleshooting book

[Poppy]

On Wed, 2002-07-31 at 05:37, Carla Schroder wrote:

> What I've found is that knowing how things work, and being able to think 
> analytically does the job. It's not like the Winblows world, where you need 
> to find the appropriate patch, service pack, or magic combination of reboots 
> and incantations, because applications are allowed to hose the OS, thereby 
> introducing a million zillion skillion possible interactions. Unlike the Unix 
> world, where such interactions are much more limited, plus you can actually 
> dig under the hood to solve problems.

As yet another professional troubleshooter, I'd like to weigh in with a
"me too"  --  Most of troubleshooting is summed up by the following
(IMO):

A: A clear idea of what it's supposed to do and how it's acting
differently
B: A clear idea of either how it works (underneath the GUI, if
necessary) _OR_ a good idea of where to find out

Between these two things, it should be possible to find a logical place
to start (usually with the most basic or the source - "where does the
process start? Oh, with a message sent from person A, well, is it
leaving person A intact? Yes, ok where's it go next?")

Given these, I often find that the most useful resources are app
specific docs, newsgroups or mailing lists, and web sites.

Oh, and my favorite source of Windows troubleshooting is often to
sacrifice a virgin chicken to the computer gods (KFC is acceptable here,
but chicken cooked at home is preferable) while muttering incantations
of "Control-Alt-Delete" over the box. ;)

> Books that I refer to often are Running Linux, Linux In a Nutshell, Essential 
> System Administration, and Learning the Bash Shell. Then of course 
> app-specific docs.
> 
(and later, snipped from another mail)
> For me, the biggest thing is learning the existing Unix utilities. My
> gosh, 
> there's a utility for every damn thing in the world! It's a treasure 
> hunt. I 
> browse Running Linux and Linux In A Nutshell just to find new ones. 

My biggest problem is that soooo much of the available documentation
describes HOW something works in detail... if I'm just looking for a
quick "HOWTO" do something, I mostly don't care right now why it works
the way it does, I just want to know how to do X so I can get on with
what I was doing.  (Ex: Was looking for a quick and easy way to change
the font size in emacs, because my eyesight isn't good enough for the
tiny font it opens with. Found all sorts of definitions of faces, but
nothing that says, "here, this is how to change the default font face"
Solution: when running in a windowed environment, the Mule menu has an
option to set the font. Has to be changed every time I open a new
window, but it's a heck of a lot faster than reading through -ALL- of
the emacs documentation hoping for a clue.)

--Poppy

-- 
Poppy,
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