Problems in production
I have been a tad busy fixing some weird little bugs lately. They helped me appreciate the multitude of things that can go wrong in a live environment and served as a gentle reminder that you should always be on your heels.
Here they are
1. LDAP and the user
A web application product was configured to use an LDAP directory structure. The directory was segregated into roles / groups / OUs, the usual. One of the users had trouble logging into the product. This was weird because this person was a valid user and Outlook seemed to recognize him. Outlook uses the same LDAP tree. So I dug into it. The easiest way to check what is going on is to use a LDAP directory browser. I use the one provided by Novell for free. The LDAPs support is not great but it will do for basic lookups.