The Magic Bean

I have this theory about "magic beans." Beans, beans the magical fruit -- the more you Magic Beans are problem fixes for those issues that are making you pull your hair out. "Beans" because they're usually really insignificant in 'size' and "Magic" because they're not normally logical, well-known, or obvious.

For instance: I just updated one of my NAS posts below with a magic bean I had forgot about. The longer story being that I had been in the middle of a package update in opensolaris when I realized I hadn't snapshot my root filesystem. Right about then it crashed. Long story short, I had to reinstall the OS and get my networking reconfigured. But try as I might... no matter how exactly I followed all the right recipes on getting networking configured it just wouldn't work. Enter the magic bean. I found a thread that looked familiar, then it hit me... there were these 4 little commands one had to run, and "poof" -- the rest of my configuration started magically working. These commands aren't normal... in fact, they're only necessary because of a defect in my network adapters or driver.

To clarify, typographical errors in code do not count as Magic Beans. They're small and not obvious... but you have the knowledge to fix them if you could see them. Magic Beans are the problems that we can't see (because we don't know how to fix them?).