No one likes to be the outsider. It’s lame when someone throws out some inside joke, or obscure jargon that results in roaring laughter from everyone but you. That feeling sucks.
Conversely when YOU’RE the one doing the obscure referencing it’s totally AWESOME!!! All the people in the “know” are cracking up at your cleverness. All the outsiders are thinking how cool you are with your vast knowledge of interesting things and fancy lingo. Obviously one of these outsiders is going to want to date you to learn more about these cool knew things.
How do you do that you ask? Tarballs, of course!
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I recently attempted to log into one of my WordPress blogs to work on a new blog post. When the login page loaded I did not see the typical page. The formatting was screwy, the buttons looked weird, clearly something happened to my blog. My blog post was shelved and all efforts shifted to fixing WordPress.
This post is different from my previous in that it’s not a fabricated issue. This really happened, and this is (more or less) how I worked through it.
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Now that we’ve discussed tailing log files and looking at the command history, it’s time to discuss starting and stopping software, aka, daemons (pronounced like day-mun, not like the evil pitchforky guy).
If you’ve read the above mentioned posts, then you know some tricks to figure out what your machine is doing, and with a little bit of luck those tips have helped you narrow down what software isn’t playing nicely.
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In the previous post I discussed how to repair an unfamiliar system using the history and diff commands.
I want to spend some time expanding on that concept of familiarizing yourself with an unknown system. Specifically, it’s time to discuss log files.
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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a phone call in the middle of the night to troubleshoot some system that I’m not familiar with.
I think to myself “It’s no big deal. There’s a documentation repository where we store data related to the systems we work on. Surely that repository has the data I need.”
*SIGH*
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to that repository and the system in question has no documentation.
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