System administration is sometimes the art of solving problems of which you don't know the source. For that kind of problems, I wrote my own checklist based on my personal experience: it's a four-phase analysis I run through until I find the problem.

• at first, don't trust the user;
• then, don't trust the computer;
• then, don't trust the OS;
• if all this fails, don't trust yourself.

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz