Why do I get no responses?

ScottJ97

ScottJ97

I'm having some networking issues, and I've started two threads in the Networking forum. I've had a total of one response (thanks aragon).

Disable ethernet watchdog timeout
Server drops off network

The first problem I solved on my own; the second is still unsolved, and makes the machine completely unreliable as a file server, and is therefore a showstopper for me.

Am I not providing enough information? Am I not asking politely? Am I posting in the wrong place? Am I being unreasonable in my expectations? Am I being arrogant just by asking why nobody has been able to help me?

Seriously, I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong. I chose FreeBSD for this machine over Solaris because of the (expected) community support.
 
For one thing, I'd choose wording on a medium like this a little more carefully, i.e. "expected" vs. "anticipated". ;)

Seriously though, I would offer assistance on those threads if I could. It appears that you have a hardware / driver specific issue that is totally greek to me. For something like this which, IMO, is relatively obscure, you might hit up the freebsd-questions mailing list (and they may refer you to freebsd-hardware; I'm not sure).
 
Having read through your posts, I don't think there's anything wrong with your questions or your attitude. But it does happen that no-one knows -- or perhaps you need to wait a little longer -- some of the knowledgable people here are quite busy and it can take a few days for them to even read your post.

But yeah, once you grow up from being a newbie, you start hitting problems that you're mostly on your own with. It sucks when you Google an error message and you get three results, two of which are in Russian and the third one is completely useless.

What you can do when you get into a situation like that is to smile and say to yourself, “I'm unique across the whole Internet!” :)
 
It has a lot to do with how hard the question is to answer, which makes sense really, because its easy to bash out a reply to when/why you should use FreeBSD over Linux. But diagnosing esoteric network problems requires a deeper knowledge. One that could probably be found on the mailing lists. I'd try there as well.
 
If, indeed, it's an issue specific to your driver/hardware combination, you might have more luck with one of the appropriate mailing lists that more developers monitor, and should certainly open up a problem report.

Adam
 
Yea, try the mailing lists. Unfortunately your problem is not easy to solve, and I suspect your hardware is fubar...
 
Notice that the questions you're asking in this thread evoked several answers. Everybody's ready to answer a "bike shed" question, very few are ready to answer a question requiring deep technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. I did get another response in my second thread which eventually led me (via Google, via the mailing list archives) to a recently fixed bug report.

It will take a few days of uptime to be sure, but I think it's solved.

The most important thing I learned here is that the mailing lists are the place to go for deep technical questions.
 
ScottJ97 said:
sure, but I think it's solved.

The most important thing I learned here is that the mailing lists are the place to go for deep technical questions.
Click to expand...

True. Only a small fraction of developers are reading the forums.
 
Since FreeBSD users are often a little more technically advanced than on other OSes, often questions asked here are those after all of the obvious solutions have been tried. Very often, many problems on this forum have exposed bugs in the software. That is why it is important for developers of FreeBSD to watch this forum as it takes someone familiar with the code to address these issues.
 
I do not like for mailing lists as it tends to create a mess of my inbox. Perhaps someone should set up a web based interface to that.
 
atarahas said:
I do not like for mailing lists as it tends to create a mess of my inbox. Perhaps someone should set up a web based interface to that.
Click to expand...

Why don't you create a separate mail folder for each mailinglist and filter them automatically?
 
Even with digests, mailing lists can get pretty cluttered. I would rather use newsgroups instead. I wonder if there are any active FreeBSD newsgroups. Even if I don't write I sometimes get to read interesting stuff on usenet groups.
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
muc.lists.freebsd.current

two that I know of
Click to expand...

The first is not greatly active, but alive.

muc.lists.freebsd.current is just a newsgroup mirror of the freebsd-current mailing list. I don't know if posts to that newsgroup make it back to the mailing list, but it's unlikely.

Mailing lists filtered into folders by procmail are much quicker for me than the get-busy-and-wait than the click-wait-type-click-wait of web forums. Probably depends on the speed of your web access.
 
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