Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Why can't I use https to access the stackexchange sites?
In order to be more secure in my external transmissions, I tried to use https://serverfault.com and found that I could not login.
Actually I get a 403/HTTP Authentication request, but its not like ...
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Solving Problems using ServerFault
Using StackOverflow pretty much guratanteed I would eventually solve each problem I posted. I believe this is largely to do with that fact that when solving problems in code, you can post the broken ...
rwired
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How to ask my question but obfuscate my real data
I asked one question about my DNS records and was forced to substitute my real domain name and IP with fake data like 111.111.111.111 & bar.com.
One user didn't welcome that and made me -1, so I ...
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In what circumstances should VirtualBox questions be on topic?
Oracle VM VirtualBox is a virtualization solution which is (now) supposedly targeted at "enterprise as well as home users" according to its web site.
In the past, we've been mostly hostile to ...
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When are legacy/unsupported systems still on-topic?
There are cases where old, barely supported or possibly unsupported server-class systems (be it software or hardware) are still being used professionally; for instance:
Low-budget operations (still ...
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Community Posts for Blog.SF?
A lot of other sites are using blog.site.stackexchange.com to create a blog on their topic with contributions from the community.
The Server Fault blog has mostly been posts from George and I about ...
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What delineates a "Business Environment?"
I recently asked a question regarding troubleshooting issues when adding an ESXi host to a vCenter server. However, this question was put on hold, and suggested to be posed on SuperUser (shown below).
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"Unclear what you're asking" - Is it?
Today, I have seen (and answered) this question on zfs. For me, the question made perfect sense and has been well-researched and well-written. Yet, it managed to earn two close votes where the close ...
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How can I get people to fully read my question?
I'm having trouble with getting people who review my questions to read the entire question before answering!
I've noticed that my most difficult questions on ServerFault usually end up with answers ...
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Have we given up on the review queue?
I'm guilty...I've given up. I simply don't frequent SF enough anymore due to the job requirements to be a daily contributor.
But I was actually pretty shocked to see the shape the review queue is in....
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Is it just me or is the quality of questions on SF declining?
Within the past few months, I have noticed a definite decline in the quality and type of questions. It seems that SF is handling a lot of programming, or beginning/home users that really should be ...
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IT Certification tags used in questions
I saw this over on Meta.SO: Should certification questions be closed? where the answer stated:
Questions that ask for clarification on or an answer to a specific
question from a certification ...
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Moderators, please educate us
After last night's town hall meeting this was said in chat
But there were some opinions from candidates that go against the grain of what the current mods enforce
which is kind of expected as we ...
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Appropriateness of a "Best April Fools Day IT pranks" question
April Fools' day is coming up soon and it's been a few years since I've pulled any pranks off at my company. I'd like to get some ideas from the general populous, but I have a feeling it would get ...
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When to flag questions that show a lack of knowledge?
I've just responded to this question, and apparently solved the (first) problem the asker encountered. The question itself hints that the asker has very little knowledge on how to use Linux, basic ...
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Should reverse-dns and ptr-record be merged?
The tags reverse-dns and ptr-record are obviously highly related. Are they so related to each other, that it would be better to have them merged as a single tag?
If it is desirable to keep them as ...
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How is questions per day calculated?
I was just looking at the Stack Exchange website and noticed that Server Fault is down to just 108 102 99 98 97 96 91 89 88 91 70 questions per day. This has dropped from 130 in Aug 2012 and I have a ...
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Kill it with Mundane Crystal Dagger: [fail]
The fail tag is fail - how meta is that? And I'm posting this on a meta site. It's meta meta meta.
fail offers no benefit. It's not likely to be searched, it does not distinguish a question's content ...
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Is "the OP figured it out to be caused by something singular" a valid close reason?
The reason I am asking (before flagging the question)
DNS issue for internal website routing internet connection from remote location
got a comment from the OP
The problem is solved. ...
Turns ...
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Canonical: "Help me size my wholly unspecified application" question
We periodically get the "Help me size my wholly unspecified application" questions, like What capacities should have a hosting to support an average of 1000 registered users simultaneously? or Server ...
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New response - duplicate of old question whose answer is no longer valid
I'm wondering what the best way is to deal with a new question which has already been answered on a previous highly upvoted question, but where the old answer is no longer valid.
The question Whats ...
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What happened to the appearance of the vote count?
I just got back on after a couple of hours away from SF and the vote count and some of the other text is now looking kind of anaemic or anorexic. What happened? Why did it get changed? I don't recall ...
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Burninate 'legal'
Seeing this question revealed that we have a legal tag. As legality is and always will be a local matter there can be no legitimate use for such a tag.
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Canonical SSH 'public key' answer?
Is there a need for a question (or set of questions) and answers around SSH publickey refusal queries?
For stuff like,
Why do I get "Permission denied (publickey)" when trying to SSH from ...
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A place for conceptual sysadmin questions
I had a conceptual question, and was (rightly) told that it did not fit into the scope of serverfault. Looking around, I found that there is a QA site for conceptual questions for programmers, but not ...
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Are country-specific questions too localized?
This question was sparked in my mind as a result of the question: "Are WIFI devices greater than 1000mW legal to use in the USA?" Ignore that the question was poor in that it simultaneously asked for ...
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About bad questions, is answering them a way to encourage them?
I just answered a question about somebody trying to circumvent some network restrictions, I understand that that kind of questions fall under the "system misuse" category, however, I answered because ...
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2015 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
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3-vote close - how's it going?
UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.
Please let me ...
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What is this [blocking] tag?
The blocking tag has 113 questions, covering
Firewall blocking (probably redundant with ip-blocking)
Undeliverable e-mail
blocking IO
resource limits
There is no tag wiki at all.
What should be ...
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What times do current moderators, and moderator candidates, generally feel are their most productive on SF?
I'd really, really like to know what times each moderator and candidate feels are their most SF-productive expressed in UTC.
The reason for the question is that SF seems to have users - and ...
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Unqualified "professionals"
We see a fairly steady stream of questions by people who for one reason or another find themselves having to do a sysadmin's work but have no experience or qualifications whatsoever. Very often they ...
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Why is the Server Fault community so unfriendly?
Why is the Server Fault community so unfriendly? On other Stack Exchange sites, I get the feeling that people are actually trying to help you, but here I very often feel that its better to find a ...
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Is SF's "good question range" too narrow?
As a relatively new user I'm somewhat confused about SF's role -- it comes across as rather narrow. For example, if a question has a hint of Linux in it should it actually go over to U&L, if it ...
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Are "call support" or "contact the supplier" valid answers?
I asked a question on SF regarding a server setup involving a SAN using Linux. It is definitely a complex question, and one of the major reasons I asked on SF, since it falls strongly in the System ...
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Looking for advice on the right way/place to ask my question about compiling
I've asked a question about packaging. I was compiling multiple depending libraries into one static, and was wondering if there was a smarter and systematic way to determine compatible versions rather ...
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Should we vote/close old Shopping questions?
I searched Meta hoping for a direct answer to this one, but so far I'm only finding semi-related Meta questions.
Here's the sequence that led me to this question.
I saw this question: https://...
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Why is there a Dell-r710 tag and not others?
This can be asked in many ways, but why is there a specific dell-r710 while there aren't for r200, r610, r620... etc etc?
Do we really want a tag for every model?
Isn't poweredge enough?
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Observation: Up-Voting appears to be more much rare here than on SU
I've seen y'all are wary of suspect upvoting patterns here on SF: Upvoting without discretion
But I've also noticed that even on questions with several comments, upvotes are very rare. Full ...
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We need a custom close reason for web hosting control panels
As part of our ongoing cleanup of old (and new) web hosting control panel questions, we need a custom close reason for web hosting control panels which explains the issue, why we are unable to accept ...
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Updating the apache tag
Currently the apache is synonym-ed to apache-2.2.
While perhaps useful in the past, it has since lost its usefulness. As apache-2.4 exists now, and the general apache tag is misleading to those who ...
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I hereby nominate dickchop as Answer of the Year
https://serverfault.com/posts/165976/revisions
I just love the fact that he went in and edited his answer to change hanging to hangin, but still used the term math's instead of dem number thingos. ...
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Linux Source code Closed Question closed on Serverfault
I noticed the Jeff Atwood close this server fault question for not being sysadmin realted: Linux Source Code
"...am looking for the source code to learn about their working in Linux for all the ...
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How to handle surreptitious promotions
This question's answer has a couple of comments of a rather suspicious nature which left me with the impression that the question's author is trying really hard to drive the discussion towards a ...
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Is the new 'Documentation' thingy something we might also be interested in?
A recent SO blog-post pointed out a new thing I had missed. Apparently StackOverflow is getting into the documentation business.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-...
sysadmin1138Mod
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What bad tags in need of burnination do we still have hanging around?
Similar to the old "bad tag collection" thread, I'm looking for suggestions/submissions of tags we still have hanging around on Server Fault, that we would be better off not having in ...
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Should I bring old questions / answers up to par or let them lie?
I do a lot of thread excavating and often find myself examining questions and answers from years ago (okay, just two years ago, but rapidly coming up on three!). I'm frequently appalled at the grammar,...
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Do the four 'cable'-related tags differ or should we merge them?
I've noticed that on the Main-site there are the tags cable, cables, cabling, and cable-management. The latter is the only one with a description, which says:
the term used to describe how one ...
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Where is the line with the Google sponsored tags?
Google sponsor some tags within the SE network. In particular, here on Server Fault google-cloud-platform, google-app-engine and google-compute-engine.
The Google support pages have this to say on ...
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