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How to get best results from the FreeBSD-questions mailing list Greg Lehey
grog@FreeBSD.org
 - $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-questions/article.sgml,v 1.4 2001/07/13 16:34:19 nik Exp $ + $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-questions/article.sgml,v 1.5 2001/07/17 20:51:47 chern Exp $ This document provides useful information for people looking to prepare an e-mail to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. Advice and hints are given that will maximise the chance that the reader will receive useful replies. This document is regularly posted to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. Introduction FreeBSD-questions is a mailing list maintained by the FreeBSD project to help people who have questions about the normal use of FreeBSD. Another group, FreeBSD-hackers, discusses more advanced questions such as future development work. The term hacker has nothing to do with breaking into other people's computers. The correct term for the latter activity is cracker, but the popular press hasn't found out yet. The FreeBSD hackers disapprove strongly of cracking security, and have nothing to do with it. For a longer description of hackers, see Eric Raymond's How To Become A Hacker This is a regular posting aimed to help both those seeking advice from FreeBSD-questions (the newcomers), and also those who answer the questions (the hackers). Inevitably there is some friction, which stems from the different viewpoints of the two groups. The newcomers accuse the hackers of being arrogant, stuck-up, and unhelpful, while the hackers accuse the newcomers of being stupid, unable to read plain English, and expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. Of course, there's an element of truth in both these claims, but for the most part these viewpoints come from a sense of frustration. In this document, I'd like to do something to relieve this frustration and help everybody get better results from FreeBSD-questions. In the following section, I recommend how to submit a question; after that, we'll look at how to answer one. How to subscribe to FreeBSD-questions FreeBSD-questions is a mailing list, so you need mail access. Send a mail message to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with the single line: subscribe FreeBSD-questions majordomo is an automatic program which maintains the mailing list, so you don't need a subject line. If your mailer complains, however, you can put anything you like in the subject line. When you get the reply from majordomo telling you the details of the list, please save it. If you ever should want to leave the list, you'll need the information there. See the next section for more details. How to unsubscribe from FreeBSD-questions When you subscribed to FreeBSD-questions, you got a welcome message from Majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG. In this message, amongst other things, it told you how to unsubscribe. Here's a typical message: Welcome to the freebsd-questions mailing list! If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, you can send mail to "Majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG" with the following command in the body of your email message: unsubscribe freebsd-questions Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de> Here's the general information for the list you've subscribed to, in case you don't already have it: FREEBSD-QUESTIONS User questions This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD. You should not send "how to" questions to the technical lists unless you consider the question to be pretty technical. Normally, unsubscribing is even simpler than the message suggests: you don't need to specify your mail ID unless it is different from the one which you specified when you subscribed. If Majordomo replies and tells you (incorrectly) that you're not on the list, this may mean one of two things: You have changed your mail ID since you subscribed. That's where keeping the original message from majordomo comes in handy. For example, the sample message above shows my mail ID as grog@lemis.de. Since then, I have changed it to grog@lemis.com. If I were to try to remove grog@lemis.com from the list, it would fail: I would have to specify the name with which I joined. You're subscribed to a mailing list which is subscribed to FreeBSD-questions. If that's the case, you'll have to figure out which one it is and get your name taken off that one. If you're not sure which one it might be, check the headers of the messages you receive from freebsd-questions: maybe there's a clue there. If you've done all this, and you still can't figure out what's going on, send a message to Postmaster@FreeBSD.org, and he will sort things out for you. Don't send a message to FreeBSD-questions: they can't help you. Should I ask <literal>-questions</literal> or <literal>-hackers</literal>? Two mailing lists handle general questions about FreeBSD, FreeBSD-questions and FreeBSD-hackers. In some cases, it's not really clear which group you should ask. The following criteria should help for 99% of all questions, however: If the question is of a general nature, ask FreeBSD-questions. Examples might be questions about installing FreeBSD or the use of a particular UNIX utility. If you think the question relates to a bug, but you're not sure, or you don't know how to look for it, send the message to FreeBSD-questions. If the question relates to a bug, and you're sure that it's a bug (for example, you can pinpoint the place in the code where it happens, and you maybe have a fix), then send the message to FreeBSD-hackers. If the question relates to enhancements to FreeBSD, and you can make suggestions about how to implement them, then send the message to FreeBSD-hackers. There are also a number of other specialized mailing lists, for example FreeBSD-isp, which caters to the interests of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who run FreeBSD. If you happen to be an ISP, this doesn't mean you should automatically send your questions to FreeBSD-isp. The criteria above still apply, and it's in your interest to stick to them, since you're more likely to get good results that way. How to submit a question When submitting a question to FreeBSD-questions, consider the following points: Remember that nobody gets paid for answering a FreeBSD question. They do it of their own free will. You can influence this free will positively by submitting a well-formulated question supplying as much relevant information as possible. You can influence this free will negatively by submitting an incomplete, illegible, or rude question. It's perfectly possible to send a message to FreeBSD-questions and not get an answer even if you follow these rules. It's much more possible to not get an answer if you don't. In the rest of this document, we'll look at how to get the most out of your question to FreeBSD-questions. Not everybody who answers FreeBSD questions reads every message: they look at the subject line and decide whether it interests them. Clearly, it's in your interest to specify a subject. ``FreeBSD problem'' or ``Help'' aren't enough. If you provide no subject at all, many people won't bother reading it. If your subject isn't specific enough, the people who can answer it may not read it. Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DON'T SHOUT!!!!!. We appreciate that a lot of people don't speak English as their first language, and we try to make allowances for that, but it's really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks. Don't underestimate the effect that a poorly formatted mail message has, not just on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. Your mail message is all people see of you, and if it's poorly formatted, one line per paragraph, badly spelt, or full of errors, it will give people a poor impression of you. A lot of badly formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly configured mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly formatted messages without you finding out about them: cc:Mail Eudora exmh Microsoft Exchange Microsoft Internet Mail Microsoft Outlook Netscape As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX mailer. If you must use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure it is set up correctly. Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers which don't get on very well with MIME. Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but many of the people you are trying to reach get several hundred messages a day. They frequently sort the incoming messages by subject and by date, and if your message doesn't come before the first answer, they may assume they missed it and not bother to look. Don't include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly, a long message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it's more difficult to get all the people who can answer all the questions to read the message. Specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult area, and we need to expand on what information you need to submit, but here's a start: In nearly every case, it's important to know the version of FreeBSD you're running. This is particularly the case for FreeBSD-CURRENT, where you should also specify the date of the sources, though of course you shouldn't be sending questions about -CURRENT to FreeBSD-questions. With any problem which could be hardware related, tell us about your hardware. In case of doubt, assume it's possible that it's hardware. What kind of CPU are you using? How fast? What motherboard? How much memory? What peripherals? There's a judgement call here, of course, but the output of the &man.dmesg.8; command can frequently be very useful, since it tells not just what hardware you're running, but what version of FreeBSD as well. If you get error messages, don't say I get error messages, say (for example) I get the error message 'No route to host'. If your system panics, don't say My system panicked, say (for example) my system panicked with the message 'free vnode isn't'. If you have difficulty installing FreeBSD, please tell us what hardware you have. In particular, it's important to know the IRQs and I/O addresses of the boards installed in your machine. If you have difficulty getting PPP to run, describe the configuration. Which version of PPP do you use? What kind of authentication do you have? Do you have a static or dynamic IP address? What kind of messages do you get in the log file? A lot of the information you need to supply is the output of programs, such as &man.dmesg.8;, or console messages, which usually appear in /var/log/messages. Don't try to copy this information by typing it in again; it's a real pain, and you're bound to make a mistake. To send log file contents, either make a copy of the file and use an editor to trim the information to what is relevant, or cut and paste into your message. For the output of programs like &man.dmesg.8;, redirect the output to a file and include that. For example, &prompt.user; dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.out This redirects the information to the file /tmp/dmesg.out. If you do all this, and you still don't get an answer, there could be other reasons. For example, the problem is so complicated that nobody knows the answer, or the person who does know the answer was offline. If you don't get an answer after, say, a week, it might help to re-send the message. If you don't get an answer to your second message, though, you're probably not going to get one from this forum. Resending the same message again and again will only make you unpopular. To summarize, let's assume you know the answer to the following - question (yes, it's the same one in each case :-). + question (yes, it's the same one in each case). You choose which of these two questions you would be more prepared to answer: Message 1 Subject: HELP!!?!?? I just can't get hits damn silly FereBSD system to workd, and Im really good at this tsuff, but I have never seen anythign sho difficult to install, it jst wont work whatever I try so why don't y9ou guys tell me what I doing wrong. Message 2 Subject: Problems installing FreeBSD I've just got the FreeBSD 2.1.5 CDROM from Walnut Creek, and I'm having a lot of difficulty installing it. I have a 66 MHz 486 with 16 MB of memory and an Adaptec 1540A SCSI board, a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball disk and a Toshiba 3501XA CDROM drive. The installation works just fine, but when I try to reboot the system, I get the message ``Missing Operating System''. How to follow up to a question Often you will want to send in additional information to a question you have already sent. The best way to do this is to reply to your original message. This has three advantages: You include the original message text, so people will know what you're talking about. Don't forget to trim unnecessary text out, though. The text in the subject line stays the same (you did remember to put one in, didn't you?). Many mailers will sort messages by subject. This helps group messages together. The message reference numbers in the header will refer to the previous message. Some mailers, such as mutt, can thread messages, showing the exact relationships between the messages. How to answer a question Before you answer a question to FreeBSD-questions, consider: A lot of the points on submitting questions also apply to answering questions. Read them. Has somebody already answered the question? The easiest way to check this is to sort your incoming mail by subject: then (hopefully) you'll see the question followed by any answers, all together. If somebody has already answered it, it doesn't automatically mean that you shouldn't send another answer. But it makes sense to read all the other answers first. Do you have something to contribute beyond what has already been said? In general, Yeah, me too answers don't help much, although there are exceptions, like when somebody is describing a problem he's having, and he doesn't know whether it's his fault or whether there's something wrong with the hardware or software. If you do send a me too answer, you should also include any further relevant information. Are you sure you understand the question? Very frequently, the person who asks the question is confused or doesn't express himself very well. Even with the best understanding of the system, it's easy to send a reply which doesn't answer the question. This doesn't help: you'll leave the person who submitted the question more frustrated or confused than ever. If nobody else answers, and you're not too sure either, you can always ask for more information. Are you sure your answer is correct? If not, wait a day or so. If nobody else comes up with a better answer, you can still reply and say, for example, I don't know if this is correct, but since nobody else has replied, why don't you try replacing your ATAPI CDROM with a frog?. Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, reply to the sender and to FreeBSD-questions. Many people on the FreeBSD-questions are lurkers: they learn by reading messages sent and replied to by others. If you take a message which is of general interest off the list, you're depriving these people of their information. Be careful with group replies; lots of people send messages with hundreds of CCs. If this is the case, be sure to trim the Cc: lines appropriately. Include relevant text from the original message. Trim it to the minimum, but don't overdo it. It should still be possible for somebody who didn't read the original message to understand what you're talking about. Use some technique to identify which text came from the original message, and which text you add. I personally find that prepending > to the original message works best. Leaving white space after the > and leave empty lines between your text and the original text both make the result more readable. Put your response in the correct place (after the text to which it replies). It's very difficult to read a thread of responses where each reply comes before the text to which it replies. Most mailers change the subject line on a reply by prepending a text such as Re: . If your mailer doesn't do it automatically, you should do it manually. If the submitter didn't abide by format conventions (lines too long, inappropriate subject line), please fix it. In the case of an incorrect subject line (such as HELP!!??), change the subject line to (say) Re: Difficulties with sync PPP (was: HELP!!??). That way other people trying to follow the thread will have less difficulty following it. In such cases, it's appropriate to say what you did and why you did it, but try not to be rude. If you find you can't answer without being rude, don't answer. If you just want to reply to a message because of its bad format, just reply to the submitter, not to the list. You can just send him this message in reply, if you like.