Server forum

Sorry to post another this quickly… but it seems quite startling that there isn’t a Server-specific forum. I’m not planning to move all of my boxes to CentOS any time soon…

  • jantman wrote, On 07/18/2008 03:06 AM:
    > Sorry to post another this quickly… but it seems quite startling that
    > there isn’t a Server-specific forum.

Can you explain please? Which problems are so server specific that they don’t fit the current categories?

Uwe

Granted, I’m used to other forums that have a server-specific category.

But I was thinking about things that (IMHO) don’t really fit into a general Network category, like distributed backups, Apache, Postfix/Procmail, network monitoring (Nagios/Zenoss), etc. as well as threads that are specific to server hardware (HP, Dell, Sun, etc.).

Or maybe, if that’s too general (or considered to be too much of an overlap with Networking, which I would argue should be more general for desktop users and general networking), then a forum on SuSE in the business/enterprise?

On 07/18/2008 jantman wrote:
> But I was thinking about things that (IMHO) don’t really fit into a
> general Network category, like distributed backups, Apache,
> Postfix/Procmail, network monitoring (Nagios/Zenoss), etc.

Applications?

> as well as
> threads that are specific to server hardware (HP, Dell, Sun, etc.).

Hardware is hardware, IMO.

> Or maybe, if that’s too general (or considered to be too much of an
> overlap with Networking, which I would argue should be more general
> for desktop users and general networking), then a forum on SuSE in
> the business/enterprise?

You’re supposed to buy Suse Linux Enterprise products then :wink:

Uwe

:wink: buy??? I worked at a educational institution with literally thousands upon thousands of Linux hosts… and I don’t think they’d ever used a paid version…

I guess it’s a matter of opinion, but I just think it would be easier on everyone if there was a single place to go for things that “normal” desktop users don’t deal with and, on the flip side, a forum that’s free of desktop-y stuff… just one guy’s opinion though.

On 07/18/2008 jantman wrote:
> I guess it’s a matter of opinion, but I just think it would be easier
> on everyone if there was a single place to go for things that
> “normal” desktop users don’t deal with

I still don’t see the point.

> and, on the flip side, a forum
> that’s free of desktop-y stuff… just one guy’s opinion though.

Ah, the point is you want less “background noise” :wink:
(That’s included in the price of SLES. SCNR <G>)

Let’s see what others think. Me I’m not convinced yet.

Uwe

The server forum over at LQ seems to have worked out very nicely… though they put a strictly software slant on it.

I can see the benefit of such a forum.

Some answers may be different for servers than desktops and this may help in keeping desktop users from getting confused at the same time.

I can see the sense of a dedicated ‘Server’ forum. Though not essential, I think it would be useful, to have a forum with a focus on server issues. However, I think the scope would need to be carefully defined, so that overlap between the Network and Application forums for example, was not confused.

On 07/18/2008 jantman wrote:
> though they put a strictly software slant on it.

And I could imagine that there are more hardware problems specific to servers than software problems. RAID problems, NIC bonding, dual PSUs…

Uwe

On 07/19/2008 deano ferrari wrote:
> However, I think the scope would need to be carefully defined,

Suggestions? I try to imagine a delimiter, but I always end up with more confusion where to post things.

Uwe

You’ll never get a clear boundary in every case. If somebody has a PHP problem, it may not be clear whether they configured Apache wrong (server problem), didn’t set up the network right (networking problem), wrote the test script wrong (programming problem), or didn’t know how to configure PHP (application problem). And the topic may cross boundaries as points are raised.

But I do think there should be a server oriented forum. Some of the questions asked are a poor fit in applications (how to I set up up a ftp server, how do I do virtual hosts, how do I do load balancing, how do I set up my own nameserver). Only by taking the meaning of applications broadly can one fit those questions there. I think that if one can answer yes to these two questions: 1. will people recognise most of the time when a question should go into this forum and 2. will it make it easier for people to find topics, then the forum deserves to exist.

We’re never gonna come up with a organizational plan that suits everyone. The problem with a server forum is that it blurs the organizational plan already in place. It’s not whether or not a server forum would suit some situations…it clearly would. It’s about whether a server forum would suit a large number of situations, and it doesn’t. We’re trying to balance having the forums structure be simple enough to maintain, but discrete enough to be useful. It’s like standing on a razor blade. Whatever we do is gonna hurt some dynamic in favor of another. We have members using both NNTP clients and web clients, and additional complexity favors neither when one looks carefully at what’s gonna work best for a mixed environment.