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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
cc: Shimon@i-Connect.Net (Simon Shapiro), freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: A Desparate Plea for Help... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 28 Apr 1997 11:51:19 +0930."
             <199704280221.LAA13874@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 1997 21:25:39 -0700
Message-ID: <9222.862201539@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> > I need to solve this problem, not to be told 9indirectly) that it must be
> > my fault, as it soes not happen on someone else's machine.
> 
> That's not what that response means.  "I can't make it happen here"
> means "I can't work out what is wrong because I can't reproduce the
> problem, and I need to reproduce the problem to have all the
> information I need to hand".

Just to chime in here (and everything that Michael says is spot-on),
it also means: "I can't make it happen here, please reduce the
components in this system to the _bare minimum_ of what is needed to
still provide services."

You wouldn't believe how often this oh-so-basic rule is violated by
someone who's got everyting up to and including the kitchen sink in
their kernel, leaving the unfortunate developer to ask "Uhhhhh.  You
seem to have _everything_ in here, from a sound card to multicast
routing to a /tmp mounted over MFS - have you never heard of
SIMPLIFYING a situation you're trying to debug?  I don't want to have
to chase down 7 different alleys at the same time so please - nuke the
MFS "speed hacks" and get that stupid sound card out of your NFS
fileserver!"

I'm not saying that this is true in Simon's case, but it's still
a damn good general rule which gets forgotten more often than
I care to think about.

						Jordan