Last week I was setting up the wonderful Switchtower to deploy CrossConnector. But for the life of me, I couldn’t get it to work. It kept giving me an inexplicable runtime error whenever I would run rake deploy.

I combed over my setup for hours, trying to find that little missing piece of the puzzle. Was it my configuration? My deployment recipe? Was I using the wrong version of something?

Finally, in desperation, I contacted Jamis Buck, the author of Switchtower. Jamis got back to me within a few minutes with a very helpful tip: check your UNIX shell. Apparently the