Why do applications have such horrible error messages. Non-specific errors are really not any more helpful than not logging at all.

I was recently setting up autofs for mounting home directories from an nfs server. The little buggers refused to work right. All I was seeing in the logfile was a notice that an attempt was made, and failed.

attempting to mount entry /home/nanderso
failed to mount /home/nanderso
How helpful is that? Not very, I can tell you that for sure. I already knew it wasn’t working. Next time you setup autofs make sure to chmod 0644 /etc/auto.*