> I have been watching this list for a few weeks now. And the people on
> here are the most un-helpful people I have seen. Your typical answer to a
> question is man this or man that.
Hmn. Perhaps we need a mailing list on how to submit to mailing lists.
Just so you all know, I've only been running Linux for three months, and
q-mail for about one month. I am a newbie in every sense of the word. Here
is my
PRIMER ON HOW TO GET A DECENT RESPONSE ON THE QMAIL LIST
*for the lost and confused*
1. At the very least, read the q-mail man pages, and the FAQ. Have look at
what's on www.qmail.org, because it will point towards many other useful
resources. If you don't understand how to unpack the q-mail archive, it's
questionable whether you should be administering a mail server, but okay:
read the man pages for "tar", that should get you started. Failing that, the
man pages are availabe in HTML on-line.
2. Make a reasonable attempt now to follow the aforementioned documentation.
Countless people have mentioned "Life with qmail" which is an excellent
primer -- but there are others.
3. Here's the part where you get stuck. First and foremost, RECORD THE ERROR
OUTPUT - you'll want to put this (preferably UNEDITED) in your e-mail to the
list. So few people understand how important this is it staggers me. Nothing
is more useless than questions like "I did this, that, and the other thing,
and now my qmail installation doesn't work. What's wrong?" How are *we*
supposed to know? Shall we come over to your office in person? Sure -- I'm
getting in my car. See you in 32 hours.
4. In addition to the error output, you should collect copies of things that
may be peripherally relevant to the problem, for example, if you are having
errors related to tcpserver, include your rules file (the uncompiled text
version); perhaps your /var/qmail/control/locals and your
/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts, for example (I use these since many problems
that people have seem to be related to these).
5. Give a clear explanation of *what* you are trying to accomplish.
Follow these five (I should add - EASY) steps, and you WILL get a useful,
very often verbose response from the many talented people who frequent this
mailing list. I did.
NOW - thought you were going to get away, huh? I have a question:
First, I've done a bit of looking but it's not immediately obvious to me
where qmail puts its logs -- in fact, I don't even know where to find the
system logs. Would somebody kindly point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
Stephen Bosch
