🚀 go-pugleaf

piglet@glutinous.custard.org (Tim Haynes) wrote ....      
> <snip>                  
> Yikes, didn't anything interesting turn up in /var/log/messages, 
> security or the xferlog before resorting to strace?
><snip>        

just responding to that point ...if I try something and it fails then 
if I knew where it dumped its error messages then I would look there.
If I didnt know that or they werent helpful then I would normally
try to  run strace on it.
*If* the strace runs ok then it is quick   .... and is
good at providing indicators for  problems like 
- what PATH it is using to find a lib,
- what file access is failing  
- what host is being queried ....   
- and probably others  that I cant think of at this moment. 

It is of little (zero?) use if the problem is due to configuration
problems such that a request is made and immediately denied without
any intervening system call action eg files being consulted. 

It does not work for suid progs (man says it turns of suid) and
I certainly have had problems running it in some situations -
normally the most interesting (read important) .

So strace can be a *quick* solution to tracking down a problem 
or of little help ... if it aint quick , I wouldnt persist with
it , but move on to some other debugging method (RTFM , source or NG?).
So in the original posting problem, I would normally have given
up trying to get strace to work , but as I had recommended it,
I felt that I ought to try a little harder before giving up :-)

It may well be that strace is not the best tool for this problem.

Cheers,
Steve Houseman 

-- 
                          
currently  steve.houseman at virgin net