So today was a fun day. You ever have one of those moments when you finally realize that you have wasted all your time on a problem that could have taken two seconds once you found the solution. Well that is how today went for me. Let me explain a little.

I set off on writing some sample component libraries for AFTER to support Firefox. Instead of trying to work with Selenium I thought I would work against FireWatir since I already use WATiR for Internet Explorer. I went and downloaded the installation instructions so I could get myself going. The first step was to install JSSH. JSSH is how FireWatir is able to communicate with the Firefox browser. I walk through all the steps listed to install the extension. Now I proceed to go and test that the install worked, since jssh doesn't show up correctly under the installed extensions. I open telnet and try to connect with no success. I now review all the steps several times to make sure that I didn't miss anything. Nope everything is good. I then check my firewall for the slight chance that it might have blocked Firefox from starting a socket server. Now mind you through this whole process I have received no error messages, no event log details, nothing. What do I do now? Where to begin debugging?

To start I want to make sure that the installation steps do work so I test on an XP machine and everything goes perfect. At this point I know it has to do with Windows Vista but I still haven't put two and two together as to where exactly my problem is coming from. I think maybe a file wasn't installed correctly so I look at my XP machine and my Vista machine and compare the directories and I see that none of the needed files are there. I then proceed to copy over my files from XP to Vista and see if that does the trick. Still nothing. At this point now I am probably two hours in and still have no clue where to begin. I am reading blogs and looking in newsgroups but no one has written about Vista and JSSH problems. Of course knowing what I know now I can see why but it surely wasn't apparent at the time.

My revelation finally comes when I see that one last file is missing and rather than just copy it over I decide I want to create it new and just copy the contents in. I right click in explorer to create a new text file and all I see is New > Folder. Now I start wondering where is everything else and at that point I realize could this be a UAC problem. I close explorer and reopen, only this time as an administrator and I create my file but then I think I should try the install again only this time launch Firefox as an administrator. I do and the install goes the same as before. But this time I also make sure to launch the cmd prompt as an administrator as well so that when I launch Firefox from it it will be in administrator mode. What do you know it works.

Update: I mentioned earlier that you had to open the cmd prompt as an administrator before launching Firefox, but that isn't necesasry. I tried tonight to do so and it does work without administrator rights.

So after three hours of searching, comparing directories, and rebuilding files my problem comes down to the fact that I didn't run as an administrator. This could have been discovered a lot easier had Windows or Firefox made some kind of mention of the fact that I was having a problem installing this extension. Other extensions have installed just fine without administrator rights but this one seems to require it. I don't know but all I do know is that everything is finally running smooth and the unit tests for FireWatir ran successfully. I hope this post will help anyone that is having the same problem I was and just can't quite put two and two together.

Now on to writing my libraries for AFTER, four hours later.