whynot4's Journal: Murphy's Law and IDEs...

Why can't a software install ever go 100% right? I support a vendor tool and we went through an upgrade last night. The software needs to be installed on various different platforms. I had done a fair amount of work to automate the uploading of files to our Unix boxes and all that stuff. I even wrote a setup script to stop the daemon, set the file permissions for the executables, copy the old files off to a backout area, copy in the new files, run crontab and start the new daemon. Great idea in theory.

The daemon needs to run as root (scary isn't it?) so to stop and start it you need to issue 'sudo' and then the command. Well, scripting sudo is not so easy. Also, automatically registering the cron jobs failed for whatever reason. The only thing that did work right was copying the files and setting the permissions. Needless to say, most of the installations were done by hand on about 30 Unix boxes.

Then the client piece wasn't letting our customers log in. That was drastic. We came up with a workaround, but it's by no means secure. This really concerns me, but I have no choice right now. The enterprise must be able to move forward and there are a lot of people who need to use our tool....

I'm waiting on my vendor to call me back to corroborate our hypothesis for a permanent fix. This could take a while. In the meantime, I'm sitting here trying to assure our customers that everything is fine. I feel like such a liar.

I'm also trying to decide between eclipse and netbeans for a Java (and general) IDE. Currently, I'm using jEdit which, IMO, is good but could be better. I have installed a lot of the plugins, but they always fall a little short (the Class Wizard doesn't always work!!). Has anyone out there used either of the two?