Self Diagnosis

The story of how this blog went down is short. (I rushed something and made a mistake).  The story of how I got it back up is epic. (Anyone who thinks Microsoft tools are easy to set up may be interested in some timeshare opportunities I’ve got available for a limited time only.)  However, a small but crucial part was played by this page.  It’s extremely boring: it just checks that Lucene has the permissions it needs to work.  The page above could have been achieved by a log file, but making it visible front and centre had a great advantage: I could use it to show my service provider what the problem was and give them a way to check that they’d fixed it. (Before this point, it was trial and error.)  It’s amazing how many systems fail when they’re misconfigured without telling you what the configuration problem is.  Diagnostics aren’t about data, they’re about communication.