So, I decide to screw around with another problem today that's been giving me grief. First, I had to deal with "unable to allocate address", which screwed me up until I realized that I had forgotten to modify my code when the host name and ip address of our (ex) production box had changed.
That should fix everything, right? Wrong. I'm using the Net::SSH::Perl module, trying to connect to a series of machines and do a couple of commands. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I get "permission denied". After stepping through the debugger, banging my head on the table for a while and chugging an extra Coke for good luck, I finally narrow it down to the fact that one machine seems to be griping about the cipher that I'm using. I decide to use the default.
That should fix everything, right? Wrong again. I notice some strange errors stored in $!. The errors "bad file descriptor" and "illegal seek" start showing up. I think to myself, "$self, this is eerily familiar to the other problem I was having in that other program where I use sockets." So I bang my head on the table some more, drink another Coke and tinker around a bit more...
What do I discover? Something is seriously wrong, and it ain't my code. Whenever I create a single object, and connect to a single host, everything is fine. However (comma), when I make connections within a "foreach" loop odd things start to happen. This is bad. This is very bad. I play with $| - no luck. I am now virtually certain that there is an IO bug somewhere in Perl. IO::Socket? IO::Select? I've already got the evidence for Net::SSH::Perl set up for a post. I'm going to put together a similar test for IO::Socket tomorrow and see if I get similar results. I'm about 99% certain I will. I don't completely understand why those errors are fucking up my programs, but there's no other explanation. They work by themselves and fail inside of loops.
This is just fucking great. A bug in IO::Socket will grind my work to a screeching halt if that turns out to be the case. So, what do I do? Go back to system calls as much as possible? Wrap huge chunks of code inside eval statements? I'll probably lose my cool tomorrow if it turns out to be a bug in Perl, unless it's easily fixed.
There's always Ruby or Python. Java is even starting to look good now. Maybe I've had too much liquor.
