TANSTAAFL /tan’stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".] "There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don’t tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom.

Taken from The Jargon File.

I provide lots of help to my friends and co-workers. Technical Support help. For free. Arn’t I Nice?

Well, not any bloody more! I’m fed up of being asked (over and over) questions that do nothing more than leave me no alternative than to ask a question in reply. From now on my technical support comes at a price:

(This is mostly "cut&paste") 

1. ASK THE QUESTION

   (It’s amazing how many people get this one wrong)

   WRONG: “I have a question about mono.”

   This is very simple, fellows. TEACH ME TELEPATHY, OR ASK THE FUCKING QUESTION.

2. Explain what it is you are trying to acomplish:
   
   WRONG: “I am trying to set up mod_cgi with apache.”

   This is worthless because it doesn’t give the person you are asking any background information. You could be approacing your problem with the wrong solution.

   CORRECT: “I am trying to set up a Wordpress blog using apache and mod_cgi.”

   Since I now know what your goal is I can say Wordpress is a PHP application, you need to install mod_php instead. This will save a lot of everyone’s time.

3. Explain what the error message is:

   WRONG: “I am trying to set up samba so I can transfer files to my linux server and it doesn’t work.”

   There are about 40,000 (at least) things that can go wrong with a samba installation. Being this vague is worse than useless, as it wastes my time and yours.

   CORRECT: “I am trying to set up samba and I when I try to connect using windows it tells me that my username or password is incorrect, but I KNOW that I am entering the correct password!”

   I would  now know that this is a common problem and could be down to a number of thigns, and give you one to try (such as run smbpasswd -a because by default samba has it’s own user database).
   
   

4. Lookup what the error means first:

   WRONG: “I am getting an ‘Error 403′ when I try to access my website, what does this mean?!”

   Nothing pisses someone off more than someone using them as their reference manual. Look up what an error means BEFORE asking for help with it. Understanding the error might be even enough to fix the problem.

   CORRECT: “I am getting an ‘Error 403′ when I try to access my website, but I have apache set to ‘Allow From All’! What else could be causing this to deny access?”

   The user probably has their directory permissions set too restrictive preveting the webserver from accessing it.
   
   

5. Explain what you expected to happen instead of the error:

   WRONG: “I set up apache but when I visit my site I get a 404 error.”

   You did? Really? Oh noes not the dreaded 404!

   CORRECT: “I set up apache but when I visit my site I get a 404 error instead of my website. I put my index.html document in /etc/apache2/ but it’s not working!”

   Obviously the user put their web content in the wrong directory. Hopefully, however, if the user followed the preveous item (lookup the error message first) they would be able to provide a slightly more useful description of their problem than this.

6. Check any log files FIRST

   If something isn’t working READ THE LOG FILES FIRST. If the log files arent helpful enough figure out how to increase the log level and try again. You might be impressed by how helpful the logs can be.
   
   

7. Read the fucking man page before asking for help (RTFM)

   WRONG: “Where does samba write it’s log files to?”

   This is answered in the man page! There’s really no correct way to say this one. This should be your though proccess with almost all software: “man samba”. Okay, hm, a list of other things. What’s this smb.conf man page they keep bringing up, the log file is probably a configuration setting right? Let’s check that out… “man smb.conf” …hm… lots of stuff here. Let’s search for “log file”, oh, there it is! …etc..

8. Use the resources geeks gave you:

   

   http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/.

Thank You.