Touch it until it works, then never again while it still does.

“So what was the problem in the end?”

“Man, I don’t fucking know.”

• me, every goddamn time

When you do it for work, you log what you have changed each time you make a change to try to fix it, and you log what you revert, so you can keep track of what you have tried, what worked, and what didn't and have a clearer idea of what the solution was.

Sometimes it really does take a while to nail down though, and sometimes it isn't entirely clear why what worked worked. Especially if you're a junior network engineer without as much experience.

I hate, hate, hate when I fix something and I don't know why the fix worked (or what the fix even was...). I want my suffering to result in something learned so it doesn't happen again.

I had bizarre DNS issue I could not figure out. It ended up being that I turned on hardware routing/NAT on my OpenWRT box and then forgot about it

I understand.

I learned again for the nth time that home assistant doesnt like refreshing my cert, and I can't go to the site to refresh the cert unless it has a valid cert...

Maybe I'll fix it tomorrow. It's valid again now.

Sometimes the problem isn't on your end. The server might be having issues, or your ISP. Have to rule those out too.

Relevant XKCD

Man, I know that feeling. One thing that helped me better deal with issues like this, was to have a changelog. Basically I write down what a setting was, what I changed it to and a reason. If something goes wrong, I can at least undo what changes I've made and see if it helps. It's not perfect, but it might shave some hours off a RCA.

Sometimes the fix has been done but the effect takes a while. For a cache to age out or a change to propogate. It all depends on what you are working with/on. Or you made a change but forgot to restart a specific service.

Meanwhile even though you did a fix correctly and aren't aware of it, since it doesn't seem to work you change something else and break it again inadvertently.