[Yesterday: 3.4 miles]
Yesterday I got a call from a fellow in Longmont wanting me to send a particular file as an email at the end of every time we run this particular program. I had to do a little bit of research into how to make this work, but it was soon evident. I tested it out on the most recent output from that program and it worked ok.
The next thing to change was our job submission script called gjajobs.shl. I edited that to put in the new command.
There’s a bit of funkyness about the gjajobs.shl file. When that file runs it creates another temporary file that has a list of commands in it for running a job. And my new command had to be wrapped up so that it would go into the temporary file which is where it actually runs.
I then did a little test to see if I messed any of the file syntax up. It all looked OK.
<here’s where I made a mistake>
This morning I found out that no jobs had run after I made my change, and there was a lot of cleanup work that had to be done, mostly by other folks. So, I ended up causing about 5 people to have to change their plans for today, a couple of them are spending significant time cleaning up my mess. Grr.
Ok, so my mistake was that the gjajobs.shl file, being a shell script, doesn’t find syntax errors until the line with the bad syntax is actually parsed and in play. I needed a more extensive test to exercise the part of the file I changed. I should have gone into the Longmont VPN and run some job of some sort, a customer listing or something would have done it. But getting into the Longmont VPN requires rebooting my PC and I tried the shortcut, with some close peering at my work. The peering didn’t do the job.
I’m not the only one who makes messes, but I do my share. And sometimes it’s someone else’s mess that causes me to do the clean-up thing. I would rather not be the source of this kind of trouble.
Computer systems seem to run pretty well over time. When something goes wrong it is almost always because something has changed. Sometimes I feel like I do better if I just keep my hands off of stuff!
My last blunder, about 6 weeks ago, was because a change a year before set us up for failure and I did not do enough to build a reminder to fix it before it happened. There’s always an exception to the rule.