John, I would welcome such a question because I don't differentiate between someone who is sitting at home doing their own thing and someone working in a corporate environment. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that it is my responsibility to help everyone that I can. My reaching out and helping everyone who needs it, I am helping that one person better understand how to design, build, deploy, and maintain software and therefore making my life easier.

Yeah. That's why it's real important that the SF FAQ defines "server" as it means to system administrators (to account for people like me who come here from StackOverflow asking about things that us CS/SE people consider to be servers) and then get SO and SU to change their use of "server" in their FAQs so people don't get confused and wander here when they should be someplace else.

I see your edit. And that's the point I'm making. When I see in the StackOverflow and SuperUser FAQs that I can ask about servers here on ServerFault, my mind goes to the definition of server that I use as a software engineer. But as you can tell from my story in my original posting, it doesn't mean the same thing here on ServerFault. The SF FAQ should reflect the working definition of server as it applies to this site and the SO and SU FAQs should reflect the definition chosen by the SF community.

The definition of server that I provided is THE accepted definition in computer science and software engineering and is pretty consistent across three books that I own, so I really can't argue with it. As for your other comments, I really like the differentiation and emphasis on the task at hand - I think you might have hit the nail on the head, but it's just a matter of making sure that if someone has a question, they know what tasks are best addressed by each community and I think that all three FAQs aren't doing so great at getting that point across.

You'd be surprised. I've seen places that used three-tier servers (dev, test, production). Test and production were identical linux boxes. Dev was a laptop running Linux. And everyone developed locally on their Windows machines before pushing to dev.

I'm pretty sure that installation is part of configuration. And if my question isn't good enough to provide an answer to, then people should leave comments asking for more information. That's what comments are for (well, one of the things they are for).

Well, that's your particular job. I know of system admins whose job includes the maintaining (or assisting with the maintenance) of development environments, including local development environments on developer machines. Just because you don't professionally do something doesn't mean that other people don't.

There's a difference between setting up MySQL for supporting MythTV and setting up a MySQL Server Instance to support software development projects. Using MySQL to support MythTV is probably not related to professional IT work (unless it's your job to go around and configure MythTV installations). However, configuring an environment to support software development is a professional concern.

My question has been edited to address every point made in the FAQ that defines the topicality of ServerFault. My question is clearly on topic.

And just a random two-cents: When the "third-place" chat goes live, this kind of discussion is much, much easier and I think will redefine most of the stack exchanges out there. Non-real-time communication isn't that great for this kind of dynamic discussion. It's good for letting people get their thoughts in the open, but not good for settling points and reaching agreements.

My phrase "don't need" was a little extreme, yes. But really, the questions and answers should focus on the beginner, notice, intermediate, and advanced realms - the top experts in a given field probably aren't the ones browsing a Stack Exchange (asking questions or giving answers), but instead writing papers and books that the people here will read. You can't cater to the experts (and I mean the true experts - I'm not going to lie, you aren't an expert, at least in the sense that I'm using the word) because they aren't here.