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Mailing for Help If the mailing list archives, (Hosting ssh)
Mailing for Help If the mailing list archives, a web search, the OpenBSD FAQ, the OpenBSD website, man pages, and other assorted resources do not answer your question, you can ask for help. The OpenBSD mailing lists are read by a variety of very knowledgeable and skilled computer professionals. Many of these people enjoy working with OpenBSD and want to help new users. These same people have also frequently spent a great deal of time making OpenBSD information available on the Internet and even answering the same question dozens or hundreds of times. Look at all the ways we just explored to get information on cryptographic hardware support in OpenBSD. Most topics have information readily available in the same manner. People who read the OpenBSD mailing lists, and answer questions on them, spent their time writing and distributing all that information. Documenting all this was a lot of work. Now imagine their reaction when they receive a piece of email asking about cryptographic hardware support. The people who write those emails have just confirmed that they want their hand held, or they’re either unwilling or unable to read the available documentation, or they have the intelligence of a brick. The writer is obviously not ready to use OpenBSD. At best, he will be ignored. At worst, some experienced OpenBSD person who wrote all those docs would probably take offense at his hard work being so utterly discounted and flame the questioner badly enough that his monitor will need three months in the Mayo Clinic Burn Unit. Keep that in mind before you send an email. Have you really checked everywhere? Are there any other words you can search under? Performing a few extra searches with different keywords is much faster than composing a useful piece of email and has a very good chance of returning an answer. Discussion Topics If you are familiar with another free UNIX, you might find OpenBSD’s mailing lists a little shocking. OpenBSD users are advanced computer users, almost by definition. If an advanced UNIX user tries to debug a problem with a piece of software, he is generally expected to know enough to ask the responsible party. On support lists for other free UNIX-like operating systems, users are welcome to ask questions on dang near any topic about any piece of software that runs on their chosen platform. The people on these support lists do their best to help out. These support lists, manned by volunteers and dedicated to providing around-the-clock response to whatever question you might ask, are provided by projects that are interested in taking over the world. Remember, though, that isn’t the OpenBSD Project’s goal. The OpenBSD folks will happily assist you with problems with OpenBSD, but software that happens to be running on OpenBSD is another matter. You may be able to get help from an OpenBSD list, if someone on that list happens to use the same software you’re having trouble with, but you shouldn’t count on it. If you’re having trouble porting your preferred window manager to OpenBSD because of some differences in OpenBSD’s libc, the OpenBSD people would love to talk to you. If you can’t configure your window manager the way you’d like, then you need to talk to the people responsible for your window manager. Contents of Help Requests Before you send an email, think about the problem you are trying to solve. What question should you actually be asking here? Define the problem as narrowly as possible. Suppose you cannot connect to your Internet service provider. Is the problem that the internal modem dials, but the ISP rejects your connection requests? Does your modem not dial? Is it detected at all? Each of these is a very different problem, with a different solution. That’s the problem you want to solve. Now that you know what the problem is, you need to gather any and all the information related to the problem. You will include this information in your email. This should include: . The version of OpenBSD you are running. . Your hardware platform. . Any error output. Be sure to check in /var/log/messages as well as your terminal. . /var/run/dmesg.boot . A complete, but narrow, problem description. Page 32
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