Over the last week or so I have been troubleshooting some problems within my home network.  As a result I have come to wonder how much managing computers software and hardware is an art versus a science

Tools and Usage

I have come to realize the tools themselves are exact and follow  a systematic methodology.  In that sense they are exact, for example, either on or off, do this or do that.  

I found though how you use them has many variations and subtle nuances where emotions (the artsy side) can play a role as much as logic (the science side).

Background

My web sites have be set up to use encryption via secure socket layer (SSL) with authentication provided by an independent Certificate Authority.

Basically content exchanges between someones computer and mine (both to and from) is encrypted so it can only be read by the intended recipient.

Also through the use of a certificate granted by a trusted source called a certificate authority (CA)  the sender can be sure the computer they are connecting to is mine. The CA is Let’s Encrypt in my case.

If the certificate is not valid your browser will warn you about the potential perils of proceeding – i.e, the target computer might not belong to who you think it does.

The certificate authority has a process I must follow every 90 days  so they can be confident I own the domain name and associated compute.

What Happened

Although my certificates have been in place for over 4 years (renewing every 90 days as required) something went wrong recently and my websites and servers were shown as unsafe.  (That is I had no valid certificate).

Without going into great detail, which would bore the majority of my audience, the point of the story is my troubleshooting which lasted over a week was fraught with many illogical, but perhaps artful steps.

In the end, I did it.  I finally got a solution. What interested me most though was the fact I needed to really dance around to get what I wanted (A valid certificate installed on my server).

It turns out this was not just a do this/do that type of recipe with straightforward repeatable instructions, which technically is what you would expect.

Artificial Intelligense

This experience has given me a better understanding of some of the pitfalls of artificial intelligence.   As computers think more like humans the art of behavior (emotional motivation) versus the scientific ways of acting will come out more and more.