I just had my mid-year review, and my manager told me that people are asking him for some of my time. That's a good thing. For a month or so, I was feeling as though I didn't have anything to contribute. Actually, for most of my time at my current job, I've been worrying that, but it got really bad the last month.

See, I spent ten years working with Unix at my last job, and at home for fun. Yeah, I have an odd idea of fun. Think of Unix as CMD.EXE on steroids. I aggregated data, generated reports, even delivered them via email or web pages, all from the comfort of a script. Now, I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I don't even know how to get the stupid computer to do the first basic thing.

Two things helped. Firstly, our storage arrays run Unix. Yes, they talk CIFS (AKA SMB) but they're running on Unix back-ends. That means there has to be at least a rudimentary Unix network to connect to the filer and maintain it.

The system admin for the management box is very new to Unix. Basically, he's a system admin for The Other Operating System (the one that I'm now currently trying my damnedest to learn) and they threw him at the Unix box. He has to follow his notebook to do the step-by-step.

Don't get me wrong. He's smart, he'll pick it up sooner or later. But, when you're cookbooking it, you don't really know what you're doing, so you don't know how things can go south.

Him: "Can you help me with (the management host.)?"

Me: "Sure. What's the problem?"

Him: "What does a segfault mean?"

Me: "It means you're f*ck*d. What were you doing when it segfaulted?"

Him: "Updating the password map..."

Me: "Oh, boy."

Actually, it turned out to be a simple typo. The passwd (yeah, they dropped the 'or' from passwORd for some reason) file is colon-delimited. That means the program expects to see a colon at certain places, and it barfs when it doesn't. He just forgot a colon, and the program saw only five fields when there were supposed to be six.

Still, I felt good. I was able to deterministically zero in on the root cause instead of just flailing about wildly until I "just happened" to get it fixed. (Which is more how I program...)

More on that next...