Little problems, big headaches.

It's what happens to people that write software.  Often, the problems that we have aren't caused by the code that we write as much as they are caused by the configuration of the particular machine we're running in.

For example, many moons ago, I created a script that automagically backs up the databases on my server and emails them to my Gmail account.  The Gmail account automatically deletes these backups.  Since Gmail keeps 30 days of history in the trash, the practical upshot of this situation is a 30-day rolling backup of my databased.  Perfect!

Then, I changed from one host to another and the script quit working completely.  I messed around with it for an hour or two, but finally just gave up.

It turns out that on the one server, PHP was installed as a CGI module and on the other, it was installed as an Apache module.  All I had to do was add a "shebang" line to the beginning of the script that pointed to the php executable on the new server and BAM!  It started working again.  Woohoo!

I was also having some database problems that was causing a forum to completely not work.  One could view posts and topics and everything, but no new posts could be added.  That makes a forum pretty darned useless.

It was another configuration issue.  I had upgraded the database server and an obscure setting somewhere was changed during the upgrade.  When I finally found it, BAM!  It started working again.

It's always the little things that cause the big headaches.