I have recently started a new job. One of my duties involves updating
files that are located on a server. With the right simple software, this isn't
too complicated and barely takes any time to learn. I copy the files over onto
my computer, work on them, upload them again – just like using Dropbox or even
getting an email attachment. The cool part is that these are the background
files of a website so when I change something and want to see if it has worked,
I just upload the files I changed and reload the website to see if the changes
took.
This worked just fine when I started this job last January. I'm
working for a small math magazine that gets distributed to some local schools. Students
work on the problems in the magazine, send in solutions and accumulate points
for the problems they do correctly. I'm the one who keeps the website for the
magazine up and running, so people can check when the next issue is coming out,
who has collected how many points during the current year, etc.
All of a sudden, just a few weeks ago, a lot of my files went missing.
The biggest file, the one with the list of students from all the schools with
their points on the last three issues – gone! At least, it would not show up in
my program that shows me what is saved on the server. Imagine looking in a
directory on your own computer where you thought a file was saved, but now the
file is gone. However, the file couldn't just be gone – because when I went to
the website and loaded the page, lo and behold, there was the list of students
with all of their points, exactly how I had last updated it.
But I needed to update that list again. How to do it? I didn't have
the file and didn't want to write it from scratch again. So, I figured out – with
a bit of help from the Internet – that the GoogleChrome browser has a tool that
lets you view the source code from a page. I tried it out, and – hey, presto! –
there was my beautiful php code, just as I had left it, displayed in a browser
tab. I copied it and created a new document, edited it, saved it under the original
name, and dragged it over to the server. Here's the other weird thing: usually,
my program alerts me when I put a new version of a file on the server; it asks
me, as you might expect, if I would like to overwrite the old one, etc. But that
time, it didn't ask me. Not only that, but when the file transfer was done, the
new file still wasn't listed. I had transferred it, the transfer had
been successful, and then it had been swallowed up into the ether. Except
it hadn’t been. My changes showed up on the website.
This happened to several files on the server, files that I had
downloaded and worked on and uploaded without a problem when I started working
there. Some files were still there. I could see them on the server; some I
couldn't.
This was vexing.
I'm not very well versed in this area, so I eventually went to see
our department's technical support person. This gentleman I had met only once
before when I introduced myself as the new member of the magazine team. I
explained my problem and he stared at me. I stared back. It is a weird problem
to try to explain.
Slowly, he rolled his swivel chair over to face his two desktop
screens. On one, he opened a program similar to mine that let him look at the
files on the server. I placed my laptop on his desk, displaying my version of
the program that lets me transfer files to and from the server. He used one
monitor to open the command line: that place where once upon a time – in an
ancient pre-mouse era – we typed 'pwd' to print our working directory, 'cd' to
change the directory, and other commands to run things on a computer. It is
still used, and sometimes, there is nothing better.
For the first fifteen minutes, I didn't say a thing. He looked,
tested, copied, uploaded, scratched his head, squinted at the screen. Nothing
worked. On his computer, it said
there were 193 files on the server. My computer registered only 177. Sixteen
files were missing. Files that had nothing to do with each other.
He made a copy of certain files, changed the server settings,
re-uploaded everything. I restarted my program and looked again. Still 177. He
changed the basic settings of my program. 177. We looked at every single
preference setting that could be changed in the program. 177.
About forty-five minutes had now passed. I had put my backpack at my
feet and was admiring his patience but I wasn't thinking we would get to the
bottom of this.
All of a sudden, he spun his chair around and began to type in the
command line. Lines of code popped up, he entered new commands, looking into
the settings of the server. Then he looked at me.
"When did you start working with the magazine?"
-"January."
"And you could access all of the files at the start?" -
"Yes."
"When you uploaded them, they were still there and you could
then download them to edit?" -"Yes."
"So it just changed at some point recently? Recently the files
just started not showing up?" -"Yes, exactly."
He smiled. "Every file that is missing was uploaded to the
server in March," he said.
I stared blankly.
What followed were five minutes of typing during which I felt very
silly, not understanding this breakthrough. After those five minutes, he
refreshed my program once again and… all the files appeared. 193.
What was this miracle cure?
He explained to me that buried deep in the server, the files edited
in March had not been saved with some numerical date, as I had expected –
03/05/2016, for example – but with the actual month written out. So, on this
German server: 'März': the only month with an umlaut in it (those little ¨
dots). And my poor American computer couldn't read them. Couldn’t read the
dots, and thus, couldn’t read the date – and did not display them. This
explained why there had been no problem with those exact files when I had
edited them in January and February, and why they then disappeared so
mysteriously after months of being fine.
We smiled at each other. "Wow," I said. "Thank you so
much! I never would have thought of that." He grinned, and it was like,
together, we had vanquished an invisible foe.
Then, since we really don't know each other at all, I gathered my
things and exited rather awkwardly. But still – we now share that victory.
Here's to all the computer detectives out there. Cheers!