[svlug] manners

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

At 10:44 AM -0700 6/30/01, J C Lawrence wrote:
>  > But you have to know what the terms are called in order to ask the
>>  questions. At first, I had no idea *what* to ask. For example, why
>>  is it obvious that I need a book on BIND if I want to set up DNS?
>>  Why is it obvious that I edit a file called named.conf?
>
>I don't see this as a valid problem really.  You're basically asking
>the following questions:
>
>   I need to do FOO.  What applications do FOO?

So, when a newbie comes on a list and says, "I need to do DNS" (in 
some variant or another), invariably they're sent to a man page, 
without specifying which page. Or, as in my case, kicked off the IRC 
channel that was specifically FOR help.

>   Okay, now I know that BAR does FOO, what is BAR's config file?
>
>Which on the face of it isn't that bad.

As long as there's some glue that gets one from point A to point B. 
Which there isn't really, except for humans.

I'll never forget the tale of the junior sysadmin who, having figured 
out it was BIND she was looking for, went looking for that term on 
Altavista. Very few of the hits had to do with DNS....
-- 
_Deirdre    Stash-o-Matic: http://weirdre.com    http://deirdre.net
"Cannot run out of time.... Is infinite time. You... are finite....
Zathrus... is finite. This... is wrong tool!" -- Zathrus