I’ve been going over a bunch of things these past two weeks and have had to deal with a bunch of guides that are just out of date. One might think that the author is busy and the like. OK, so be it. But some of these guides are the only guides out there and some of this stuff is pretty complex.
I was working on getting openvpn running on my pfsense router. I wanted it to work with frootvpn. As I searched around I found guides for PIA and a bunch of those guides were quite varied in how. I watched youtube videos. Those were even more varied. None of the guides handled any sort of issue that might crop up.
When I was putting together some asterisk servers (on Ubuntu boxes) the guides were error prone and incomplete. When I was putting up an email server the guides were complex, failed to state optional parts, and had unexplained concepts.
Today I’d been notified that one of the domain names had expired letsencrypt certificates. I’d spent a little time in the past trying to renew it. All sites except this one failed to renew. I received some generic error about something failed. I looked up the specific messages online and only generic responses none of which addressed my problem.
I gather the letsencrypt program that I had was out of date and I needed an update and even finding how to update the program took a while. It appears that the letsencrypt people, though wonderful for what they are doing, changed how this worked for them and updated the programs and failed to deal with existing install, obviously making a lot of people have to deal with working through the same or similar issue. Only no one anywhere in the letsencrypt forums were adequate explanations presented about how it call came together so one could walk backwards to resolve the issue. Seriously.
I managed to get it working but only with a lot of trial and error and the disabling of my own important sites. And it didn’t help that firefox caches stuff in a way that you can only get past it by exiting and reloading. And apache2, all the times I had to reload the service. And the time it failed because there was a config file for a site in one of the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled or /etc/apache2/sites-available folders. The error messages were convoluted. Anyone new dealing with these kinds of errors would have wasted a great deal of their time looking up each error only to be redirected to help that wasn’t applicable because a lot of guys were guessing at what the problem and solution was. On one site one guy got big upvotes for his solution yet the guy that got 0 votes was the one with the answer.
The problem is the the guides are never edited over time. The people that created them haven’t themselves likely updated their systems. The forum posts are hitting the top 5 spots in google search and they remain there because people are guessing that one of the top 5 must be the answer or they wouldn’t have that ranking. It just aint so.
From VPN on a raspberry pi to a vpn on pfsense to trying to figure out what the vpn provider means by 5 consecutive to getting an email server setup properly and having each guide specific to a distro or even a different release of the same distro because the distro admins decided to remove something critical to the whole process. Then having repeat issues with letsencrypt. I’d really like it to just work for a few months without me having to manually intercede to correct the issues that only the engineers know about.
Is there any wonder why people are not happy with computers any longer?