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This question is, admittedly, incredibly basic. It is also something that I have to explain way more than I would like to some people. Just because the OP didn't put a lot of effort into researching the answer doesn't mean that it should be closed, IMO. Downvoted? Sure. Closed? No.

That's just my opinion, though. What does everyone else think?

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My two cents: I think there are two types of questions at play here:

Basic, Unresearched & Not Valuable questions ("Hey you guyses! I'm admining a Linux box! How do I show what programs are running!") should probably be shot in the head. ServerFault is unique among the SE sites in that we're geared toward professional system administrators, and there is a basic barrier to entry there (if you're not competent to handle even the basics (or to take a stab at Google) you're likely to get told to Seek Professional Help in the form of consultants, etc.)

Basic, Unresearched, but Marginally Valuable questions (Like the one that sparked this post) should stick around. This is a legitimate area of confusion, and I usually spend 15-20 minutes with junior admins who don't know the difference to explain why capitalization is important. If we get a junior-admin type with massive confusion it's good to have an answer to point them at.


Note that my opinion above is based on the (subjectively large) number of questions lately that have had to get comments like "You need to tell us more for us to help you", or "What have you already tried to resolve this issue?" -- I guess this is a special subset of the first category above (let's call them the "PLEZ HALP!" questions).

In order to preserve the signal-to-noise ratio I think we need to be somewhat aggressive with our pruning.

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Ultimately that question should have been killed on Stack Overflow - don't migrate crap.

I agree with its closing because this guy is clearly not a systems administrator - he's a turkey that has convinced his company to spend money and he's not seeing the ROI on their investment and he knows he's going to get in trouble for it.

The question itself though, if it had been written in a different way, then perhaps it might have been OK to stay.

We're not against easy questions, because we like our site to be at the top of google results, so not googling a problem is usually not an excuse to close a question. But that question in its current form isn't going to apply to anyone except him.

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    Hm. Perhaps I'll make a stab at a canonical question and answer for the 100MB 100Mb thing.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 19:35
  • @MarkM - I've just edited the question to re-open it. Feel free to edit it even further.
    – Mark Henderson Mod
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 19:37
  • @MarkM Once you've got it worked up, drop a link into meta.serverfault.com/questions/1986/…
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 19:38
  • @sysadmin1138 Mark H reopened the original with some edits to make it more acceptable. As it currently stands, do you think it belongs in that list under the networking heading?
    – MDMarra
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 19:40

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