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One important point that a lot of us seem to be completely missing is: Sysadmins do NOT always have the luxury of choosing the hardware/software! It certainly is nice to be able to choose the best gear for the job at hand. But that is not always possible. My situation is that our company is supporting on a professional basis, many small business clients ...

I disagree with this, because this is way too broad, and it's unhelpful, and it will encourage people to hit people on the head with this question instead of, you know, helping them. There is a time and a place when advising someone to get professional help is appropriate, but it should not be the first answer. Otherwise, this answer could basically apply ...

No, it needs more work. This text has some flaws that still need to be worked out. We need more revisions. If you have specific problems, add them as a comment. Though, for extended debate on specific points, another meta-question or chat-transcript is probably a better choice.

Removing the requirement to be a professional means telling these users “your question isn’t appropriate as it stands, improve it by...” instead of telling them “you don’t belong here because you aren’t what I consider to be a professional sysadmin. But as I understand it, the requirement has never been to be a professional; the requirement has always ...

Just my $3.50, indexed for inflation: Any questions explicitly or implicitly asking about circumventing/violating an institutional or government policy are off topic for Server Fault. Period. Do not pass Go. Do not collect unemployment when fired for cause. I don't think we need to adjust the FAQ to clarify this -- It is implied in the first line: Server ...

Strike "No exceptions." from the "Anything in a home setting" line Anything in a home setting. No exceptions. While I'm all for the sentiment the reality is that we DO deal with things in a home setting in the course of every-day corporate support -- See for example this meta question asking if it's OK to ask about VPNing in to the office from a ...

What about development? That is currently excluded together with the home environment, but that exclusions is omitted in your draft. Setting up development environments is explicitly on-topic in Stack Overflow and has been off-topic on ServerFault. But... There is the DevOps trend that works well for start-ups and more and more enterprises think that is ...

This is not a good idea. We have enough of a problem with being snippy around here without being able to rattle off a 'U NOOB! HIRE A SYSADMIN!' with a link to a canonical answer saying so. That is REALLY going to put people off the site.

I'm not opposed to changing the help center text (I'm the idiot who suggested doing it last time, and frankly I still don't think it's very good), but I have some issues with your proposal as it stands. Professional Capacity We have pretty clearly defined what we mean by "in a professional capacity". It's meant to exclude bad questions from developers who ...

I'm very skeptical of this change. "Managing informaton technology systems" could include a newbie volunteer who is trying to set up a mailing list for a student club on Go Daddy hosting. The question could be as "We're looking for feature X, which seems to be missing. How can we work around it without paying for a more expensive service?" Not very ...

As I already stated in a comment: I actually thought the FAQ covered this pretty well. Questions pertaining to "domestic/consumer grade" devices are not automatically off topic. Quite the contrary. The very vast majority of businesses use such devices. It's only the medium and upward businesses that can justify the expense of "enterprise grade". It's not ...

Yes, this is good enough. It's good as is, no revision-round needed. Approved.

I have to admit that I am really really glad to see answers trending towards permissive on this question. Frankly I am starting to get worried about a mindset that seems to want to find as many ways as possible to rule a question off topic. And then "burninate" or "baninate" or kill it with some insane amount of overkill. We're starting to sound a lot like ...

I've sent a message off to the Developers, since changing the faq requires (as I understand it) a site version iteration since it's part of the static files of serverfault.com. We're waiting on word right now.

This bit is too broad: working with services hosting or enabling your information technology We still aren't wanting to accept such things as end-user shared-web-hosting questions. But excluding these in the list of topics is tricky. I think this is a bit better: deployment to and management of third-party provided information technology ...

I don't think it's a good idea...and I honestly don't see it come up that often. Who actually posts questions on this site? It's not "non-IT" folks from other departments/professions posting questions, 99% of the time I'd venture it is someone in IT or at least been given the responsibility of administering whatever they are asking about (otherwise it's ...

Yes

Policy "subversion", yeah. Policy "avoidance"? I can imagine some legitimate questions. "My firewall blocks all outbound HTTP requests due to a policy requirement; how do I get WSUS/package manager to work?" "Our VPN solution and security policy don't allow split tunneling, but we have an application that won't work. How can I get its traffic to avoid ...

Has someone done a canonical q/a for this? If not, someone should make one explaining what they need to do to figure that out themselves, and we can point them all there.

What about someone asking for tools to be used in benchmarking? Seems to me that would be perfectly on topic. e.g. Someone might be looking for the tools and/or methods which might be employed to perform benchmarking on say various RAID configurations (there's more to the world than just web servers). It's not enough to just throw a load at it, you need to ...

I suggest sticking here to technical issues, as @shane suggests, and note that finding a good written FAQ policy for that may be tricky. I also think the Security Stack Exchange site is suitable for some of the security-related discussions where there are conflicts between legitimate policy goals, as I've tried to lay out at Conflicting policies, and ...

While we do get a lot of these, I think a FAQ-ban would be a bad idea. We tend to treat the FAQ as holy writ around here, and have zero tolerance attitudes towards things specifically excluded in it. There are enough useful edge-cases around this question that are quite topical that would be chucked right out if we had a FAQ ban that I think we'd be poorer ...

Two things spring to mind: It's adequately covered already because policy subversion is unprofessional (as per Shane's answer). The people who tend to post those questions show no signs of having read the FAQ anyhow, making it pretty pointless. Policy subversion/violation questions will continue to be posted, regardless of what's in the FAQ. Leave them to ...

As someone defending the original question here's my tuppence worth: It doesn't seem to matter what is in the FAQ, as there are enough people with close voting rights that will do what they want anyway, and get their way. Maybe this is fair enough, or maybe 5 close votes is not enough. Who am I to say. Or maybe 10 points should be deducted for each ...

Add the following (or something similar) to the part about our sister sites: We have sister sites: ... All these sites are part of the StackExchange network, which covers a broad range of topics. Reason: I believe most new users don't understand that SF is part of a whole network of sites, and with this line we make the reference explicit, not just an ...

On one hand I think this is a great idea. When your production mission critical application is down and you are out of your depth a true professional takes a step back, realizes they are in over their head and hires someone who has the knowledge to immediately stabilize the situation and get the company back up and running. This truly is the right answer in ...

There is some inconsistency in the wording that kind of bugs me. In the following... Servers hardware Operating Systems, including linux windows-server-2008 freebsd solaris Server Software, such as apache2 exchange-2010 sharepoint Virtualization, including vmware-esxi hyper-v kvm ... we go from using "including" to "such as" and back to "including". The ...

Add best-practices for addressing organizational and technical challenges to the Operations, Maintenance, and Monitoring: section

I'd say we should go with the context of the question: Questions about consumer grade equipment used in a professional setting are fine, although they can be migrated to SU if they're very likely to get better answers there. Questions that happen to be about a home setup but are clearly applicable to a business environment are fine. I think that in order ...

I don't see any need to modify the FAQ. Furthermore, the proposed policy change would be detrimental to the site. There are already people who vote to close any question that implies that the asker is not in complete control of policy. This is short-sighted, snobbish, and more than a little silly. It is rather common for a professional system administrator ...