Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 02:34:33 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: nik@iii.co.uk Cc: newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: login_getclass unknown class Message-ID: <19980403023433.63772@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <19980402095351.50685@iii.co.uk>; from nik@iii.co.uk on Thu, Apr 02, 1998 at 09:53:51AM %2B0100 References: <Pine.BSF.3.91.980401173352.19507A-100000@user.xtdl.com> <199804020125.TAA08568@darkstar.connect.com> <19980402113719.25471@welearn.com.au> <19980402095351.50685@iii.co.uk>
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On Thu, Apr 02, 1998 at 09:53:51AM +0100, nik@iii.co.uk wrote: > How do, > > [ cc'd to -questions, because it answers the original posters question > (in a roundabout way) and to -newbies because I think this reasonably > states *my* approach to answering questions, and I want to know whether > people think I'm being too harsh. When replying, please make sure that > your reply goes to the correct mailing list. ] > > On Thu, Apr 02, 1998 at 11:37:19AM +1000, Sue Blake wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 01, 1998 at 07:25:46PM -0600, Frank Pawlak wrote: > > > You might want to check out the errata for release 2.2.2 > > > > That won't necessarily help. > > > > Why doesn't somebody just tell this guy where the file he is missing > > can be found, and leave it at that. > > I think this is part of the "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. > Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." philosophy, although > (IMHO) Frank could have phrased his answer a little better. I wholeheartedly support that philosophy, but when properly applied it is easily distinguishable from the punitive teasing responses we sometimes see. If the helpful person has clearly not bothered to do the act that they are demanding of the other, they do not earn my respect. And if that omission leads to incorrect advice being given and/or gross and unproductive inconvenience to the person who is already having a hard time, then I start to lose my cool. Most of the people on -questions are great with newbies, and the quality of responses to newbies questions has improved a lot in recent months. The rare sarcastic or patronising responses are, unfortunately, the ones we tend to remember best and the ones that shape our future actions and reactions. > I just went to the search engine, and put "Login_getclass" in the mailing > list search box. OK, so you know what to do and how to squeeeeeeeeeze the best out of the search. And you've been considerate enough to show us how you'd go about it, thanks. It's a lot more than most bother to offer. I think we need to work through a lot of examples to become good at searching. When an urgent problem arises, unfortunately it's a little late to commence studying a whole range of new information gathering techniques. I've sent two people to search for the same thing recently and their searches have failed. When I've searched for it myself I've pulled out scores of arrogant inacurate and misleading responses, but who knows, the next newbie to come along might already have these skills in their genes. Now I know, if someone wants my advice on "hey, I did everything right but it's giving this error, how do I fix it" I am to give them no hints but just a huuuuge list of little tasks that will do them ever so much good, and teach them some useful skills in the process, like reading the handbook, faq, searching the mail archives _and_ the web pages, reading all of the .TXT files on the FTP site, looking for man pages and other documents, tutorials, books,... Sure, it's a lot of work but by doing it they will learn what they should have known to stop them making the same mistake again, right? Wrong. In this case it was nobody's mistake and nobody should have had to be punished or, ahem, retrained. The old 2.2.2 CD installed with this file missing, causing the problem. Nothing in the installation-related reading material, that I can recall, urges people to read the errata. Anyone who was nosey enough to read the errata would have been misled because the errata on the CD was in error. Anyone (except the lucky first few) who asked on -questions was blasted for not reading the errata on the CD, which wouldn't have done much good anyway. That was a fair while ago now, and this has gone down as a good party piece on the repetitive stupidity of newbies, when it should have been remembered as a rare example of how carelessly unthinking some of our most clever people can be, following each other like silly little soldiers. This doesn't happen often at all, and the circumstances (a huge multiple bungle) here are quite unusual. It does not serve well as an example of how questions should be asked or answered. I was there, I lived through it on this side, desperate enough to do anything to fix the problem and unable to break through. (And everyone knows how bloody-minded I can be when I want something!) Eventually I arranged for a login.conf to be delivered to my home on a floppy disk after a very long wait. The incident back then was an exceptional one, not a good example of handling questions, and not something that any of us can be proud of. This fact is sometimes overlooked for the sake of a good story at our expense. Often all newbies and all newbies problems are treated exactly the same out of sluggishness of habit. This particular problem is one which cannot be dealt with as if it were yet another premature question. The circumstances are unusual in this case, and to my eyes the reaction has been way over the top. On the other hand, some newbies are the most lazy inconsiderate greedy twits that you could possibly imagine, and they feel quite happy about asking numerous simple questions each day to save them the trouble of looking things up or attempting think for themselves. And some are quite blatant about it. When these people are pandered to, as I've watched happening in at least one case recently, I get just as annoyed. Some newbies give all of us a bad name. With a few of those people being seen a lot while we hide politely in our study rooms, and then a lack of finely tuned searching skills among newbies in general, no wonder we're all assumed to be the same. > I looked at the results. Since this is an e-mail archive, > I know that any replies *should* have "Re: " at the beginning of the > subject line. Since I'm looking for answers to questions, I want to > ignore anything that doesn't have "Re: " at the start of the subject, > since it's probably someone else asking exactly the same question. > > Result #4 is the first one that looks promising, > > 4.Tim Moony Re: inetd[xxxx]: login_getclass: unknown class 'root' > > and following that link does take me to a message that explains the > problem. > > For jollies, I did the same search on the web pages. You did a search on the web pages?? Whatever would possess you to search web pages for a thing like this? > The *very* first hit was for > <URL:http://www.freebsd.org/releases/2.2.2R/errata.html>, and the first > entry on that page is > > o login as root produces "login_getclass: unknown class 'root'" on system > console. > > Fix: If you have the source distribution installed, simply > cp /usr/src/etc/login.conf /etc > otherwise, get it from the FreeBSD FTP site using this URL: > ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/src/etc/login.conf > instead. Simply cd to /etc and then run fetch(1)> with the provided > URL. OK, that helps a lot! How would you have tackled searching for an answer to the problem of cron saying "Cannot fork"? I found nothing but my searching skills are clearly not up to the task yet. (Note: I found the answer by accident but still wonder how I should have found it) > As I've said (in e-mail to Sue), it's very easy to think "Ah, I've got a As I've said (in e-mail?), it's very easy to think "Ah, I've seen an > problem, I'll just send off a quick e-mail to the mailing lists, it's so answer, I'll just send off a quick e-mail to the mailing lists, it's so > much easier than searching." If everyone does that the lists start to much easier than checking." If everyone does that the lists start to > drown in a sea of repeated questions. And after a while the people that drown in a sea of repeated platitudes. And after a while the people that > do answer the questions (well, me, anyway) get bored of answering the same do try to ask good questions (well, me, anyway) get bored of the same > questions, and start to ignore them. misleading advice, and start to ignore it. > Which benefits no one. Exactly. > [ In case it's not clear: that's my opinion above, and I have no idea if > anyone else on -questions holds it. It's certainly not an 'official' > opinion of the FreeBSD project. ] Yeah, well that's just my opinion of the moment after a disk crash, an inadequate backup, and a long frustrating day. Try me again tomorrow :-) -- Regards, -*Sue*- find / -name "*.conf" |more To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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