Joseph Brower

So I ran into an interesting issue today.  A particular machine couldn’t connect to a network share while everyone else could.  The technician could ping and could access the internet.  Something was obviously wrong that wasn’t the standard issues so I was called to go out onsite.   After getting out there, I dug into google some and found the resolution to the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946937

I had to edit the registry to get the machine to be able to browse shares.  Something about that just feels wrong.  It isn’t so bad that you have to edit the registry to fix it.  I could live with that, I use linux and have had to find some obscure configuration files to edit with obscure settings.  What upsets me is that the error was a general error (Network Location Cannot Be Reached), the windows troubleshooter didn’t help, and there was nothing in the logs.  In other words, a crippling error existed and was not only lacking information about the problem, but without any information in the logs how is someone to find the answer.  You would expect anything that is important enough to throw a dialog window up to tell you something should be important enough to be logged somewhere.   I haven’t ever run into an error like this in Linux that failed to log what was going on.  I’m sure that certain apps don’t do it, but this is an OS error, not an error with a specific application.  Anyways, the fix worked, so you have to give them credit there.  I guess this is mostly a message to all of the coders out there.  Please log information, especially errors, it makes troubleshooting so much easier.