Introduction

The FreeBSD community

FreeBSD was developed by a world-wide group of developers. It could not have happened without the Internet. Many of the key players have never even met each other in person; the main means of communication is via the Internet. If you have any kind of Internet connection, you can participate as well. If you don't have an Internet connection, it's about time you got one. The connection doesn't have to be complete: if you can receive email, you can participate. On the other hand, FreeBSD includes all the software you need for a complete Internet connection, not the very limited subset that most PC-based "Internet" packages offer you.

Mailing lists

As it says in the copyright, FreeBSD is supplied as-is, without any support liability. If you're on the Internet, you're not alone, however. Liability is one thing, but there are plenty of people prepared to help you, most for free, some for fee. A good place to start is with the mailing lists. There are a number of mailing lists that you can join. Some of the more interesting ones are:

• FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org is the list to which you may send general questions, in particular on how to use FreeBSD. If you have difficulty understanding anything in this course , for example, this is the right place to ask. It's also the list to use if you're not sure which is the most appropriate.
• FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org is a list for newcomers to FreeBSD. It's intended for people who feel a little daunted by the system and need a bit of reassurance. It's not the right place to ask any kind of technical question.
• FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org is a technical discussion list.
• FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org is an obligatory list for people who run the development version of FreeBSD, called FreeBSD-CURRENT.
• FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org is a similar list for people who run the more recent stable version of FreeBSD, called FreeBSD-STABLE. We'll talk about these versions on page 582. Unlike the case for FreeBSD-CURRENT users, it's not obligatory for
• FreeBSD-STABLE users to subscribe to FreeBSD-stable.

You can find a complete list of FreeBSD mailing lists on the web site, currently at http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources.html. This address is part of the online handbook and may change when the handbook is modified; follow the link Mailing Lists from http://www.FreeBSD.org/ if it is no longer valid, or if you can't be bothered typing in the URI.

The mailing lists are run by mailman (in the Ports Collection). Join them via the web interface mentioned above. You will receive a mail message from mailman asking you to confirm your subscription by replying to the message. You don't need to put anything in the reply: the reply address is used once only, and you're the only person who will ever see it, so the system knows that it's you by the fact that you replied at all. You also have the option of confirming via a web interface with a specially generated URI. Similar considerations apply in this case.

FreeBSD mailing lists can have a very high volume of traffic. The FreeBSD-questions mailing list, for example, has thousands of subscribers, and many of them are themselves mailing lists. It receives over a hundred messages every day. That's about a million messages a day in total for just one mailing list, so when you sign up for a mailing list, be sure to read the charter. You can find the URI from the mailman confirmation message. It's also a good idea to "lurk" (listen, but not say anything) on the mailing list a while before posting anything: each list has its own traditions.

When submitting a question to FreeBSD-questions, consider the following points:

1. Remember that nobody gets paid for answering a FreeBSD question. They do it of their own free will. You can influence this free will positively by submitting a well-formulated question supplying as much relevant information as possible. You can influence this free will negatively by submitting an incomplete, illegible, or rude question. It's perfectly possible to send a message to FreeBSD-questions and not get an answer even if you follow these rules. It's much more possible to not get an answer if you don't.
2. Not everybody who answers FreeBSD questions reads every message: they look at the subject line and decide whether it interests them. Clearly, it's in your interest to specify a subject. "FreeBSD problem" or "Help" aren't enough. If you provide no subject at all, many people won’t bother reading it. If your subject isn'tspecific enough, the people who can answer it may not read it.
3. When sending a new message, well, send a new message. Don't just reply to some other message, erase the old content and change the subject line. That leaves an In-Reply-To: header which many mail readers use to thread messages, so your message shows up as a reply to some other message. People often delete messages a whole thread at a time, so apart from irritating people, you also run a chance of having the message deleted unread.
4. Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DON'T SHOUT!!!!!. It's really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks. Alot of badly formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly configured mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly formatted messages without you finding out about them:

   Eudora

   Exmh

   Microsoft Exchange

   Microsoft Internet Mail

   Microsoft Outlook

   Netscape

   As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX mailer. If you must use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure it is set up correctly. Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers which don't get on very well with MIME.

   For further information on this subject, check out http://www.lemis.com/email.html.
5. Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but many of the people you are trying to reach get several hundred messages a day.Theyfrequently sort the incoming messages by subject and by date, and if your message doesn't come before the first answer, they may assume they missed it and not bother to look.
6. Don’t include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly, along message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it's more difficult to get all the people who can answer all the questions to read the message.
7. Specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult area: the information you need to submit depends on the problem. Here’s start:
   • If you get error messages, don't say "I get error messages", say (for example) "I get the error message No route to host".
   • If your system panics, don'tsay "My system panicked", say (for example) "my system panicked with the message free vnode isn't".
   • If you have difficulty installing FreeBSD, please tell us what hardware you have, particularly if you have something unusual.
   • If, for example, you have difficulty getting PPP to run, describe the configuration. Which version of PPP do you use? What kind of authentication do you have? Do you have a static or dynamic IP address? What kind of messages do you get in the log file? See Chapter 20, Configuring PPP, for more details in this particular case.
8. If you don't get an answer immediately, or if you don't even see your own message appear on the list immediately, don't resend the message. Wait at least 24 hours. The FreeBSD mailer offloads messages to a number of subordinate mailers around the world. Usually the messages come through in a matter of seconds, but sometimes it can take several hours for the mail to get through.
9. If you do all this, and you still don't get an answer, there could be other reasons. For example, the problem is so complicated that nobody knows the answer, or the person who does know the answer was offine. If you don't get an answer after, say, a week, it might help to re-send the message. If you don't get an answer to your second message, though, you're probably not going to get one from this forum. Resending the same message again and again will only make you unpopular.

How to follow up to a question

Often you will want to send in additional information to a question you have already sent. The best way to do this is to reply to your original message. This has three advantages:

1. You include the original message text, so people will know what you're talking about. Don't forget to trim unnecessary text, though.
2. The text in the subject line stays the same (you did remember to put one in, didn't you?). Many mailers will sort messages by subject. This helps group messages together.
3. The message reference numbers in the header will refer to the previous message. Some mailers, such as mutt, can thread messages, showing the exact relationships between the messages.

There are more suggestions, in particular for answering questions, at http://www.lemis.com/questions.html. See also Chapter 26, Electronic mail: clients for more information about sending mail messages. You may also like to check out the FreeBSD web site at http://www.FreeBSD.org/ and the support page at http://www. FreeBSD.org/support.html.

In addition, a number of companies offer support for FreeBSD. See the web page http://www.FreeBSD.org/commercial/consulting_bycat.html for some possibilities.

Unsubscribing from the mailing lists

There's a lot of traffic on the mailing lists, particularly on FreeBSD-questions. You may find you can't take it and want to get out again. Again, you unsubscribe from the list either via the web or via a special mail address, not by sending mail to the the list. Each message you get from the mailing lists finishes with the following text:

freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"

Don't be one of those people who send the unsubscribe request to the mailing list instead.