Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 08:11:17 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: FreeBSD-Newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: #freebsd-newbies Message-ID: <199804221511.IAA00691@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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>Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 19:20:30 -0700 (PDT) >From: Pauper <pauper_i@yahoo.com> > been a lot of chat about a new channel.... :-} > I would agree with Sue in that the channel, as a help channel, >wouldn't be too helpful - the blind leading the blind so to speak, >unless some more experienced users could be persuaded to devote some >of their time to staffing it. I agree with that point. As someone who is relatively new to FreeBSD (per se), but familiar with UNIX, and whose job is administering UNIX (mostly FreeBSD) boxen, I confess that it had never occurred to me that IRC might be used for assistance. Granted, I still tend to think of IRC as a fad (I expect I'm disclosing information about how long I've been in the field...). And I admit that the only time I've ever done anything with IRC is when my niece was visiting our home, and she wanted access to IRC, so I found a likely-looking IRC client, FTPd it over to the Sun 3/60, configured it, built it, installed it, and it seemed to run OK. She used it, not me.... :-) [Persuading her to exit the xterms, rather than merely closing the windows, was a losing battle, though -- and it rather confused things for the next couple of weeks, when a pty would be allocated for a "new" xterm, and it turned out that she still had the IRC client running in it.... Took a while to figure out what was going on; after than, judicious use of the "kill" command proved quite useful.] More to the point: I cannot conceive of ever having the time to actually use IRC for anything -- I deal with well in excess of 100 email messages/day (and that's reduced as far as it is largely because I subscribed to freebsd-questions-digest, rather than freebsd-questions) at work, as well as about half that at home. (And at home I don't have access to FreeBSD.) And I have a few other things to deal with, as well.... >Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 21:22:41 -0700 (PDT) >From: Ben Manes <anarchy@crl.com> >Here's the real problem, who (with expreience) will sit around and answer >all these questions.... >As people have noted, freebsd-questions and -hackers wont >answer simple questions.... I subscribe to -questions-digest & to -hackers. I have seen answers to simple questions that are posed to -questions answered. Sometimes the initial answers are things like "we need to see information X in order to provide a more useful answer" -- but I've even seen questions answered there where the question, as posed, was something I just couldn't understand. -hackers, of course, is less receptive to beginners' questions. That said, I've posed questions (to -questions), and sometimes I get an answer; sometimes I don't. One particular case involved asking how to get at a particular "struct" (so I could write some code to display the mount options that were actually in use, vs. what I *thought* I had specified) -- never got a response at all on that one. On the other hand, I did get some hints in response to another (re: avoiding NFS V3, as well as avoiding "loop-back" NFS mounts), and I was able to work some things out, so I sent a note back to -questions indicating the resolution to (what I perceived as) my problem. david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 401-0168 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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