A Tale of Two Line Endings: A Support Engineer's Odyssey

🎧 Introduction

[Music]

This story is about my time working for a managed service provider, supporting the IT needs of various companies.

🆘 The Mystery of the Crashing Service

One client was migrating their systems to a new version. Every time I tried to start a particular service, it would crash and display a kernel dump. We couldn't figure out the cause.

🕵️‍♀️ Escalating the Issue

After exhausting our troubleshooting options, we contacted the third-party software vendor. They couldn't identify the problem either, and the issue was escalated to higher levels. Eventually, I had the personal phone number of the company's vice president, the software's original developer.

👨‍💻 Days of Frustration

For days, the vice president and I tirelessly investigated the issue. We tried different servers and every conceivable solution. Finally, I realized the license key required for the software had been copied from a Windows machine to a Linux machine.

culprit: The Line Ending Mismatch

The culprit? The line ending characters, which signal the end of a line and the start of the next, were different between Windows and Linux. This difference was causing the software to choke.

💡 The Simple Fix

All it took was a single command to switch the file format to Linux, and everything miraculously worked! [Laugh]

⏳ The Cost of Ignorance

While the solution was simple, it cost me two weeks of my life. [Laugh] We'll just leave out the exact duration, though.

💡 Conclusion

This experience taught me the importance of considering even the most seemingly insignificant details. A seemingly trivial difference like line endings can have significant consequences.