It's the little things which make a difference.

Like forgetting to check to permissions on "/".

Yeah, well I was putting together a new computer and since I had built the required configuration before I collected all the approriate files on my workstation. I then tar-ed up a fake /etc and /usr/local directories in to a single tar file and took it over to the new machine, Cd-d to root and unpacked it on.

Of course tar helpfull chmod'd the new system's "/" to the fake "/" I was using when I put the tar file together. But I didn't notice this at first.

The thing is nothing stopped working straight away. It was only when I rebooted and exim failed to start with the meaningful message "user mail was not found" that the problems started - I tried ripping exim4 out of the system entirely and putting all back in , fighting the debian packaging system as the would normally leave loads of broken packages.

I ask one of my colleages to look at it and he point out that he couldn't su to mail. I had spotted this but was sure hoe to debug it - you often cant strace su for security reasons.

While su's error message as lots more help, "Can't cd to /var/mail' I had checked the /var and the /var/amil perms.

Suddenly as I was explaining all this to my colleague , the penny dropped and I check "/"s perms and all was clear.

A Day for Bug

As an occasional, and the past more frequent contributor to wxWidgets . I decided to help out when I saw the Bug Day on Saturday annouced. Even though it was me & my girlfriends anniversary I managed to spend a few hours helping out.

More interestingly it has awakened my enthuasim again - so maybe I'll spend a few more weekends just picking of bugs in the bug tracker and doing something about them.

So the even the bug day didn't no much on it own , it may have got me and hopefully some others moving again , or faster which will help overall