Making Me Sweat

For quite some time now, I've been working on an Enterprise Search project for my organization. Last week I've installed a FAST ESP system as part of a POC, the system uses many third party software components and since each has it's own license they can't be provided as part of the ESP software and have to be downloaded as part of the installation process.

But, here's the catch, I don't have any Internet access on my network. The installation guide provides a solution for this kind of scenario - install the ESP on a computer with Internet access, after the components are downloaded you can abort the installation and transfer the components any way you want to your LAN.

This is a very strange solution, why run an unnecessary installation? What if I have limited privileges on my Internet computer?

After all, there's a much simpler solution - why not provide me with the links to the components? After all, what I did was to harvest the links from the manifest.xml the installation uses to download the components...

Why make me sweat?

Storming In Or Taking Baby Steps

When you have a problem (specifically, technology related) there are two main methods for dealing with it:

1. Storming In - throwing everything you have at the issue, e.g.: trying every performance related command you know, changing hardware, etc.

2. Taking Baby Steps - slowly and thoroughly analyzing the issue, e.g.: reproducing the issue on a development environment, checking all changes that have been made, etc.

Reality, like always, is some shade of gray so what you do in practice is usually some combination of the above two methods.

Many times it's not clear what approach to use. Storming in will sometimes solve the current crisis but might handle only the symptoms leaving you unprepared for the next time the problem manifests itself (and this time the instant solution might not work). Generally, it's always better to understand the causes for a problem and to investigate them, but sometimes issues won't reproduce on development environments and the causes are just too voodooish and some issues are just simpler to ignore. And after all, time IS a valuable resource.