In case you’ve missed it (even when the chances of that happening are low), there’s a new website for system administrators and IT professionals that you’ll probably find useful. Server Fault was launched on April 2009 as a private beta, and went into an open beta on May 2009.
Basically, Server Fault is a place where system administrators can ask questions and get answers from peers willing to share their expertise. It uses OpenID, so if you already have for example a Google, Yahoo or Technorati account, you can use those credentials for authentication.
The website implements an interesting feature called reputation, which is a scoring system similar to those used in some bulletin boards.
There are literally thousands of questions that have already been asked (and answered), which indicates that the site’s popularity is quite good. If you take a look around, you’ll find very different kind of questions: from the most basic you can think of, to the extremely specific or complex ones.
From time to time you’ll also come across some question that is totally irrelevant to systems administration, but that’s something that cannot be avoided (anyway, the voting mechanisms offered by the website help a lot to separate the wheat from the chaff).
Asking a question is a different story. Sometimes you can be lucky and get pretty good and clever answers. And some times the only thing you’ll get will be useless ones. Or even none at all.
I’ve been testing Server Fault by submitting some tough technical questions, and while sometimes I got really good answers or hints on how to solve specific issues, I also got quite a lot of irrelevant replies. But even in those cases, I’ve found the overall experience quite amusing.
As with any other online resource, this one certainly can’t replace the professional advice you could get from an expert on a given field. But I think it’s a good place for sharing knowledge amongst peers.
