A coworker and I have spent the last three days trying to get some open source software to work. We had it working enough so that it was usable for most situations. Yesterday we found the magic key that suddenly fixed everything. I have to say that I am glad to have figured out the problem, but somewhat frustrated it took so long. In the end, it turned out to be a problem with a configuration file buried deep in the software. This leads me to the question: why wasn't the configuration file located in the configuration directory with all of the others?
The product we are using is open source, which means there is no cost to use the software unless you count our time trying to configure it. It also means that the software was put together by any number of people working in their spare time. The product is rather large and complex, requiring a bigger development team. Unfortunately the guy responsible for the part we needed, never got full credit on any of his homework assignments in college.
The solution to our problem was found through a number of Internet searches. Another group was having a similar problem and was kind enough to post their solution on a software-help forum. Unfortunately they had an error in their solution, but we were able to figure it out without too much difficulty. Knowing which file to edit was the difficult task in our exercise.
Once everything was working correctly, I pulled out my engineering notebook and recorded what we did to fix the problem. Should a similar problem happen in the future, I have the solution written down.
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