The Silent Woman

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Jim Kuzdrall <gnhlug at intrel.com> wrote:
> Thanks Ben!  Right on.

  You're welcome.  :)  Glad to hear a computer is working for a change.  :)

>  Some times I wonder if you are just the Internet representative of
>  30 brilliant software guys who standby in a secret room waiting for a
>  problem to pounce on.  It seems like too much detail to carry around in
>  one head.

  While I do have a rather eclectic collection of knowledge stuffed
into my head, I think it's more that I am apparently good at finding
and correlating information.  (I also seem to understand how
programmers think.  That worries me, sometimes.)  While I suspect some
of this may be innate, I do believe many of the skills can be learned.

  In this case, I knew vaguely what SASL was, but had little idea what
that error message meant in practical terms.  So I turned to my first
choice for most knowledge: Google.  Copy-and-pasting the error
message, with quotes around it to turn it into a search phrase, found
other people reporting it.  In many cases, the fix was to compile,
install, or fix some library.  That reminded me that I'd seen multiple
packages with "sasl" in their name before.  A quick check with yum
revealed them already installed on my system.  It seemed a good place
to start.

  "rpm --verify --all" has saved my butt on more than one occasion.
And a packet sniffer is an indispensable tool for network
troubleshooting.  I had to fire up the GUI to remind myself what to
click, though.

>> yum list *sasl*
>
>     Since it would be a package not included in the installation, I
>  searched the names in the installation DVD rpm directory.

  FYI: Unlike rpm, yum also knows about packages which are not
installed.  It has a database of all available packages in the
repository (distribution), which it keeps current via the Internet.
So in my case, "yum list *sasl*" actually listed not only installed
packages, but some more that were not installed, and some recent
updates to the ones which were installed.  I would expect SuSE to have
a similar tool; they were already good at that when I tried them years
ago.  Indeed, SuSE may be using "yum".

-- Ben