Some of the problem-solving we do has a forensic component (not in the legal sense). When something breaks down, we perform what’s known as Root Cause Analysis. It’s well and good to fix the symptoms so things are running again, but it’s more important to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.

Often enough, we’ll login to a user’s account and check out what they’ve run recently. They might have edited a config file, removed some necessary wrapper scripts (this happens on our shared hosting servers), or blindly duplicated something that really shouldn’t be copied. Whatever the case, these are good places to start looking when you need to fix something.

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