SNAFU

Posted by marco
Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

I spent a frustrating week of problem solving (or at least trying to…) of obscure integration issues among different programs, like trying to get zabbix to talk with a jabber server (the solution was found in IPV6), reading unuseful logs to debug problems (what the hell do you mean with “connection failed”? To what?) , recompiling software with arcane options, rebooting servers with the swap space full (apache, what are you doing?), or trying to stop a server that continues to reboot itself at boot (Xen, please tell me why…), or fighting with buggy PHP frontend, and, last but not least, investigate why a monitoring software just stopped working.

So I come to wonder if it exists a software that “just works”. If you ever happen to read this rambling and know such a software, please, please tell me. In the meanwhile I coined a law:

Dela’s Law of software: there is no software that “just works”
Corollary to the Dela’s Law of software: if a software seems to “just work”, after some times it will stop to work for an obscure, unknown and very difficult to find reason.