NANOG, its decline in s/n

Thu Aug 8 15:59:17 UTC 2002

I would go along with that.  Not to create a 'loop' here.  But if you 
think about what you said, you can be correct, but still not be able 
to change the behavior, nor should we try.

A newbie or someone that might not 'know' the resume of the replier, 
does a post on something of great importance to him.  He is unsure of 
the solution himself, and receives a wonderful response from a 
veteran on the list.  Let's be honest here, most of the pros will 
post a very brief but curt reply.  They dont have time to waste but 
want to be helpful.  The newbie not knowing the backround of a Sean 
or a Manning, will question the brief advice since it is their router 
(etc) they are about to type COMMIT into.  That makes the Pro feel 
like his advice was unheeded.

In reality, it comes across as arrogant for us to expect the newbie 
not to question the advice.  I am not saying it IS in fact arrogant 
but it does come across that way. And the newbie may in fact simply 
be playing devil's advocate back.  I always learn from the threads I 
have time to read through, someone might have a better way of 
explaining something as simple as BGP.

I also learn from each time in front of a white board, explaining the 
same thing I might have done 100 times.  And yes Mr. Norton, I am 
learning to s-p-e-a-k s-l-o-w-e-r.

  FYI the only recent waste of mail space was the thread on that poor 
engineers signature.  I am not sure how that really needed a thread. 
That was about as unforgiving a response Ive seen since someone wore 
a tie to nanog!

David

At 10:42 -0500 8/8/02, Rob Healey wrote:
>>  I've been a lurker on the list for a good long while now, and recently I
>>  have become pretty active. I think a lot of the pro's post, and the
>>  problem isn't that the people are banished to newbie.dev.nul (I like
>>  that by the way.), but that the people that originally asked the
>>  question endlessly debate the advice that gets posted by people that
>>  really know what they're talking about. This causes a great deal of
>>  frustration, and it's how the endless loops in threads end up happening
>
>	I've noticed that alot of the advise given is appropriate for
>	larger, i.e. tier 1, setups but isn't necessarily as useful
>	for tier 2/3/N+1.
>
>	Things that work great in large scale might be unweildy or not
>	even feasable on a smaller scale and vice-versa.
>
>	North American Network Operators aren't necessarily just tier 1's...
>
>	This might be one of the causes of "energetic" discussion when one tier
>	answers what makes sense for its scale but another tier is puzzled why
>	anyone would ever consider such an approach.
>
>	To avoid confusion in the future it might be helpful for both
>	questioner's and answerers to mention what scale their addressing
>	in the question/answer.
>
>	Just a suggestion,
>
>	-Rob

-- 

David Diaz
dave at smoton.net [Email]
pagedave at smoton.net [Pager]
Smotons (Smart Photons) trump dumb photons