Missing the Obvious
When troubleshooting a problem (with computers or anything else), it’s always a good idea not to overlook the obvious. this particular cricket bat of good advice gave me a good whack in the face this morning.
I’m setting up my development environment at the new job, and doing the usual wrestling with unfamiliar software packages. In this case, I’ve checked the codebase out of our Subversion repository, and I’m trying to persuade Dreamweaver to mount this folder as a site with auto-upload of local changes to an FTP site, which in this case is a VMWare guest Linux system running a LAMP stack.
I pick an XSLT file at random, edit it and save. A progress bar pops up in Dreamweaver saying that it’s FTP-ing off to somewhere, and all seems well. Just to double-check, I log on to the VM guest OS, and do a quick
ls -l /var/www/html/blah/my.xslt
It looks as though it hasn’t worked - the date bewing reported is about 4 days ago. I try again, same dialog, same result. I start to worry that I’m FTP-ing to the live server by mistake, and run round the houses checking IP addressses, FTP paths, etc. In the end, a colleague is kind enough to take a look and find the real culprit. Whenever I start up the VM, there’s an innocuous warning message saying that the perceived and reported clock speeds don’t match, known workaround at www.vmware.com/blah/, which I didn’t bother to look up, as my guest OS seemed to be running fine. Turns out it did have a minor effect on the guest OS though, it meant that the system clock was running about 4 days late!