Okay – so this one was originally blown off as “Eh… whatever” but it’s been festering in my brain for the better part of a day and I must free myself from the bondage of M$ bullshit.
My dad has a Mac (thank god), but for several reasons – has a copy of VMWare Fusion installed which allows you to run Windows in a virtual environment on the Mac. Some will say nothing is worth running windows on the mac, I say that is pure ignorance – but that’s not the point here. (For the record, I have basically the same setup on my machine as well).
Anyway, Dad was updating his website and having a few issue with some M$ software – I was helping him … and he started getting a “httpdocs folder can not be found message”. Okay… lets look into this. The folder/directory exists on the server… I can see it… wtf? We look and look and look… but NOTHING. Finally I decide to try a direct connect from his computer and it wont work. You see – it turns out – something in the VM had caused it to loose net connectivity. Now… you can blame Mac, you can blame Fusion, you can blame XP … I really don’t care. The thing I do care about is “httpdocs folder can not be found” is a COMPLETELY WORTHLESS ERROR MESSAGE! I mean, that’s like saying “Website not found” in a power outage…. no shit sherlock! (Anybody commenting about their iPhone or web access from a battery power device may get kicked in the sensitive bits…. you know what I meant).
Had M$ said “Unable to connect to server”, or “FTP Unavailable” or any other such message related to the real problem, it would have saved me at least 30 minutes of my life.
Error Message FAIL!