Obsidian1723
Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:24:11 pm
This isn't an all-inclusive post on how to ask (and get) help in a manner that is efficent and effective in cost of time and effort for all who are involved; but I think it's a good start.
1) Learn not only what to ask, but how to ask it.
Read this link in it's entirety. Yes, it has "attitude" and you'll need to get by that part of it, but the advice is sound. Often times people fail to do a simple Google search for the answer to an easy problem; or they just post something on IRC or a forum such as' It's broken and it doesn't start". Devs and IT people need a lot more to go on than that. Again, the attitude and snarky elitism on this link is there, but please read it and get past that because the information is sound and it will make solving problems easier for you and anyone who is trying to help you.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
2) Provide information.
I highly recommend and suggest installing hardinfo via sudo apt-get install hardinfo and then run it. Afterwards, hit the "Geenrate Report" button and it will output to an HTML file by default, but you can choose to save it as a text file (TXT) instead.
This is probably one of the best ways to get ALL of the info to the devs - short of tar.gzipping up /var/log and FTPing it to them
It's a good idea to learn about the log files so that you can troubleshoot your system as well as monitor it. If for example a developer is working with you on a kernel issue, supplying them with the info from hardinfo's generated report is good; but you'll probably also want to give them some logs out of /var/log such as kern.log (whuch is the log for the kernel)
There's more that I could add, but these two things are the best places to start at first off.
If anyone wants to contribute to this thread, by all means, provide #3, 4, 5, 6, etc, and perhaps we can help it evolve into something really great.
1) Learn not only what to ask, but how to ask it.
Read this link in it's entirety. Yes, it has "attitude" and you'll need to get by that part of it, but the advice is sound. Often times people fail to do a simple Google search for the answer to an easy problem; or they just post something on IRC or a forum such as' It's broken and it doesn't start". Devs and IT people need a lot more to go on than that. Again, the attitude and snarky elitism on this link is there, but please read it and get past that because the information is sound and it will make solving problems easier for you and anyone who is trying to help you.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
2) Provide information.
I highly recommend and suggest installing hardinfo via sudo apt-get install hardinfo and then run it. Afterwards, hit the "Geenrate Report" button and it will output to an HTML file by default, but you can choose to save it as a text file (TXT) instead.
This is probably one of the best ways to get ALL of the info to the devs - short of tar.gzipping up /var/log and FTPing it to them
It's a good idea to learn about the log files so that you can troubleshoot your system as well as monitor it. If for example a developer is working with you on a kernel issue, supplying them with the info from hardinfo's generated report is good; but you'll probably also want to give them some logs out of /var/log such as kern.log (whuch is the log for the kernel)There's more that I could add, but these two things are the best places to start at first off.
If anyone wants to contribute to this thread, by all means, provide #3, 4, 5, 6, etc, and perhaps we can help it evolve into something really great.