48-Hour Field Notes: It Passed Locally and Died Remotely — Eight Environment Facts I Now Diff First
Have you ever shipped a script that ran clean on your laptop and then failed on a remote box with nothing more useful than exit code 1? I spent a two-day window on exactly that class of failure, and the boring answer was not a bug in my code at all. The two hosts disagreed about timezone, file-descriptor budget, and default text encoding, and each disagreement broke a different part of the same job. This is the checklist I now run before I trust any second host, plus the small harness that prod…