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So I asked this question about a system I use for work: Wget and Curl complain about expired ceritificate, but it's not expired?

It got closed with the following reason:

Questions on Server Fault must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment. Home and end-user computing questions may be asked on Super User, and questions about development, testing and development tools may be asked on Stack Overflow.

Apparently, enough people agreed on this before it actually got closed, but it doesn't make sense for me.

Why is it not 'business environment'? What is 'business environment'?

What if I'm an entrepreneur working from home?

The suggestion to move it to other sites does not make sense either:

  • super user is for users, I highly doubt I would get help debugging ca-certificates with regards to DST Root CA X3 Expiration there
  • stack overflow is for programming, while my question is 0% programming

Could someone please explain?

3 Answers 3

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I'am not a Linux expert nor I voted to close, but there is two issues I see with your question that could bring a close vote. To state it too, close are not permanent, if you correct the question it can get re-opened.

  1. The fact it's for a lab machine. If it's a lab machine, why you don't upgrade to a supported OS ? This bug would not be there if so. For lab question it's one of the reason lab question fall off-topic, because they bring issue that we don't normally see in a business. I would add if you use that machine to dev, it can even cause you problem to port your work on a newer distribution.

  2. The age of the distribution which can get you closed for unsupported software. Running unsupported OS is a risk for any business. For that cause it exist a close reason.

The close reason is that one;

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For that reason I will give two exemples for an OS I know more;

First exemple; "My windows 7 I use for lab can't get Windows Update, it fail on the WSUS certificate, how to fix ?" - That one would be probably closed for the reason 1 or 2 I stated.

Second exemple; "I have a MIR system that I manage and it have an outdated Windows 7 that I can't upgrade, how can I make it report with my newer WSUS server?" - That one got a busines reason to be using that older software, which make it more probable to stay open.

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I would extend the reason to "generally acceptable technologies and practices that are found in a typical business environment".

Hardware, operating systems and applications that are end of the support life cycle are problematic for numerous reasons, including security vulnerabilities. These also tend to have and accumulate a lot of obscure and difficult to identify defects.

Another example are the "I installed a VPN server and now everything gets disconnected". Or network examples that obviously don't exist in a business environment.

These probably don't show up in search but there are a lot of them.

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Further to the other answer, when multiple close reasons are selected by close-voters, only one (whatever gets the most votes) is shown. There was a close-vote for the reason mentioned in the other answer - using a long out-of-support version isn't a generally good practice.

Also, since you said it was a development machine, the original close-voters were probably looking at the other part of the "business environment" close reason:

...questions about development, testing and development tools may be asked on Stack Overflow.

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