My boss can be so much “fun”

Well, I have just had one of those many fun times at work.

My boss calls me into his office. He is hunched over his keyboard staring at a “The page cannot be found” in IE. He points to it and mumbles about not being able to access a development page. I look at the URL and see one of the internal addresses on it.

He quickly hops over to Putty, where he has SSHed into the *nix server and has the apache httpd configuration file opened.

Now, I am getting ready for the little snippet of tech-based insanity that is about to come my way.

Well, he starts pointing at a commented out VirtualHost entry, which is right after the not-commented out entry. He is saying that there must be something wrong with the conf file since the VirtualHost entry is commented out, and this must be why he can not get to his development pages. I look and say “no, see the Virtual Host with the asterisk before it, that is the valid one. It works better to do just asterisks and then use ServerName and ServerAlias as needed.” I asked if he had just added the devel Alias and path, to which he says he hadn’t. He then carries on about how that couldn’t work, because you are trying to define the server information at virtualhost, but then redifining it with servername and serveralias, and on with stuff like that.

He tries the page again, tails the error_log which says it could not find /var/www/html/{name} directory. He says that is wrong, the directory should be under /home, and there has to be something wrong with the conf file, and what changes did I recently make to it. I said that I hadn’t changed anything. He then looks at the timestamp on the file, and it was last updated around a month ago. This starts messing with his mind because he was using this dev location just last week. He says “oh, that must be when the file was created, not updated.” I chose not to correct him on this (remember, still my boss). He restarts apache, and tries again, still no joy on the page. This time, when he tails the error_log, I look quickly to see something.

Yep, he spelled the name wrong. Instead of http://IPaddress/name, he had something like http://IPaddress/naame . Yep, you have to spell it correctly for it to work. I pointed out the spelling error to him. He starts retyping the URL, all with an attitude of ‘that can’t be it, you had to have broken something.’ Wouldn’t you know, that fixed it. He then starts checking the code changes he had made, and wants me to hang around while he tests the new page he worked on. I guess he was still looking for something to go wrong that was my fault.

Needless to say, nothing wrong from my end of the line. Oh well.

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