My general thoughts --

First we need to (re)define what our scope and target audience is.

Our FAQ currently says "Information Technology Professionals" -- this was arrived at after much debating during the great FAQ rewrite (sffaq) because we did not want to exclude members of our target audience of system, network, DB, etc. admins.

The more I think about this the more I think we were too broad: developers are "Information Technology Professionals", and many of the clueless masses doubtless consider themselves so.
Perhaps we should consider narrowing the scope of that line to more clearly define who we are looking to serve.

Along the same lines, we have had many discussions on Meta about the requirements of a "professional", but those are not articulated anywhere in the FAQ.
I believe we should spend some time crafting a FAQ section that specifically addresses what professional means in the context of Server Fault.

Then we need to enforce it.

This means closing questions that are clearly not a fit for the site -- most of which fall into a few categories:

• Too basic The asker lacks the requisite technical background to understand what they're asking.
  Questions like "How do I get a list of IP addresses on an interface?" fall in this category.
  Often the user isn't even the system/network admin of the environment in question, in which case these questions really belong on one of Unix & Linux, Super User, Ask Different, or Ask Ubuntu.

• No Research These are the "How do I make Apache log the remote IP?" or "Give me a tutorial on X" questions -- the answer is plainly available in documentation (or a Google search), and the asker is being lazy.

• No Troubleshooting
  "Apache is giving me a 404 error - HELP!" type questions.
  These are often asked by 1-2 year junior admins (or people thrown into an admin role without experience) who are apparently mortally terrified of asking their superiors questions or admitting they don't know something.
  As a result they ask lousy, unanswerable questions. We have a meta topic to guide them toward writing a good question, and this sort of rot should be closed with a link pointing there (and reopened if fixed).

The Summer of Love and The Winter of Our Discontent

I don't like that Server Fault has a reputation of being "the mean Stack Exchange site".

I also don't think it's spilling any great secrets that Stack Exchange doesn't really want one of their sites viewed as mean either (after all they thrive on traffic, and mean sites don't get much traffic). The growing hostility toward new users (mainly on Stack Overflow and Server Fault) was the impetus behind last year's Summer of Love.

That said, in order to keep Server Fault from becoming "Technical Support For The Intertubes" there is an extent to which we must disappoint the clueless masses who think that's why we're here.

System Administration has a time-honored tradition of "Read The Fscking Manual" for a reason -- those who can read and interpret documentation and apply what they've learned to new situations will likely become good sysadmins, and those who can't (or won't out of laziness) are frankly not suited to be professional system administrators.

Enforcing this 40-plus-year-old cultural standard with neophytes is how the profession self regulates. There's nothing wrong with doing so here, as long as we don't devolve into berating people in comments.
Remember that we are a site for professionals, which means that the main site should always maintain a level of professional decorum and courtesy, even when we're telling someone they're in the wrong place or their groundwork doesn't meet our standards.