What do we do about "Specifications" questions?

Question

I've noticed an uptick in questions that are literally asking us to read the vendor's spec sheets to someone (There's PowerEdge 2950 hard disk , this weekend we had one asking what the address space limits of WinXP 64-bit were, and we've had a bunch that seem to have been closed which were asking about provider-specific configuration questions like How do I do X in my Rackspace account manager?).

What is the consensus on these? Should we answer them, should we lay the closure smackdown on them, or should we do something else?

Answer 1

My $3.50:

ServerFault IS NOT tier 1 technical support. We should expect a minimum standard of effort from people asking questions here. That means at least a cursory Google search, and the understanding that questions about specific hardware or software limitations, pricing, provider-specific configuration questions, etc. are best asked of the vendor.

I've been commenting/voting to close based on that, referring people to their provider, the vendor, etc. for an answer when it's painfully obvious that no research/effort has been expended before running here to ask the question.

I don't mind the occasional "How many Herps can my Derp9000 support?" questions, but it seems that this is becoming more than occasional. I would hate to see the site become "please spoonfeed me my vendor's spec sheet".

Answer 2

I find the idea of taking a category of questions and applying a sort of default rule to close them is very disconcerting unless there is data to support a serious problem. The problem is that this sort of behavior creates a community with all sorts of hidden rules known only to the in-crowd.

Both sysadmins and Programmers in general have a need to classify and organize things, sometimes to their own detriment. So when there are "rules" like this people tend to jump too quickly to close a question without taking a more holistic approach to its merit.

In the example you linked to, PowerEdge 2950 hard disk , a better response is to take our experience to educate the user on the question they meant to ask but were not experienced enough to know that is what they should have asked. Such an answer would be something along the lines of:

"There are several factors that effect the maximum storage size for a single server including: The Raid Card, The Current Firmware, limitations in the operating system [list more here]... Vendors can be helpful in many situations so it is good to double check with them, but being aware of all of the above, you make sure your vendor contact is being thorough and checking all of the above for you. If you don't deal with vendors in this educated fashion, it will often end up biting you in the ass".

So what this does is extract a canonical question and answer from what the user was trying to figure out. Canonical answers are helpful, advance the profession, and create content the community can be proud of. Advancing the profession and creating great content will invite more expert system administrators to become part of Server Fault, finding excuses to close questions won't.

Answer 3

More often than not, people ask questions whose answers are easy to find because they don't know where or how to look for them. I think that the answers to these are of value. It may be obvious to an expert that the answer can be sourced from page 2 of the derpotron-9000 manual, but to someone with less experience, they may not know the contents of the manual, or maybe even have trouble understanding it.

Answers to questions that are sourced from the manual will usually have the reference point of where precisely in the manual it can be found, and this might have more value than the actual answer itself.