[sf-lug] SSH program Dropbear vet 0.46

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John (jstrazza at yahoo.com):

> At the office one of our customers is having trouble with this
> software.  I’ve look at the net, but can’t seem to get anywhere.
> 
> Can anyone provide assistance?

John --

I sympathise with your situation, wanting to provide help for a third
party, but (probably) having only a vague description of the problem
being encountered.  This puts you in a bind, because you don't have
adequate data.  Unfortunately, by the same token, the rest of the world
doesn't have adequate data, either.

A key problem is that, one gathers, you find yourself in the position of 
being an intermediary.  The customer isn't talking to LUGs, and may or
may not even be providing meaningful information to you, yet you're
expected to act on the customer's behalf and get help.  It may be too
late for the present situation, but I'd suggest to you, going forward,
that you try to avoid being such an intermediary in the future.

Let us imagine a situation, for comparison's sake, where the customer
subscribes to sf-lug at linuxmafia.com and engages with the online
community directly.  Let's call the customer Andy.  Andy posts 'I'm
having problems with Dropbear version 0.46.  Please tell me how to solve
them.'

So, then, one of us says 'Welcome, Andy.  In order for us to help you,
you will need to (metaphorically) go back, reproduce the problem for us,
and record or transcribe an accurate, verbatim, sequential account of
exactly what happens -- not a description, but rather a record, the raw
data of your software experience.  Then, edit any parts obviously
extraneous out of your software-session transcript, then post that
edited session back to this mailing list.'

'By the way, Andy, your contemporaneous session account must be at
leasst detailed enough to clarify matters so vague at present that
there's no way anyone could possibly help you.  For example, Dropbear 
is an omnibus package consisting both of a server (daemon) program to
accept incoming SSH connections, and several specialised client
programs (dbclient, dropbearkey, dropbearconvert, scp).  At present, we
cannot even determine whether you are trying to run an SSH server, or
trying to connect to one.'

'And, Andy, _assuming_ that when you say "Dropbear" you mean you're
trying to use a client piece, such as (say), the main client program
dbclient, please include some modest checking of underlying
connectivity, something like this:'

'If you were trying to SSH to a target machine called
target.example.com, include the results of:

  ping target.example.com

and

  dig target.example.com
or
  nslookup target.example.com

Thank you.'

Since in this case Andy isn't engaging with the community, you and your 
firm are pretty much obliged to substitute for the community.  Good luck
to you and to probably-not-Andy.