live chat with other nanog'ers

Fri Dec 30 05:56:43 UTC 2005

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 07:51:31PM -0800, Kyle Lutze wrote:
>>
>> My problem with #nanog on efnet is not that there is off topic chatter
>> with people unwinding, its when you go in their to ask a question (such
>> as I had forgotten what AS stood for and asked really fast) and you get
>> crap answers, for example:
>>
>> AppleBoy` question on some keyterms used on the list, what is an AS?
>> xkev      what is an AS?
>> TestACL   typo for ASS
>> xkev      ashkie, anal suppressor
>> xkev      alk;hr
>> xkev      ..  AS: anal suppressor
>>
>> and it basically went on like that. So, new chan, perhaps with only
>> decent people in it.
>
> Like I said, #nanog is not an appropriate place for absurdly novice
> questions. The people you mention above are regular nanog attendees and
> experienced network operators (actually, very experienced), and you are
> not only wasting their time you are intruding on their conversation by
> coming to that channel to ask silly questions. That is not intended to
> be mean, that is simply the way it is.

No matter what the question was, how experienced they are or what
you think they intended, I find such behavior as seen above to be 
inappropriate and something that shows true character of those on
that channel.

Now, it is possible that if they were in totally in private company
(private irc server & channel) and definitely outside work, it may
have been understood as appropriate type of a joke for that company, 
however that is a public channel with people coming in and seeing
this behavior just shows the type of company it really is that exist
on that channel. Unfortunately this is also rather common for many
channels on eifnet (and several other large networks) and this played
big role in why I stopped participating in irc some 6+ years ago.

Now the only IRC channels I occasionally visit are in fact on freenode
that have to do with some open-source projects I participate and like
many others I do find freenode to be amazingly good place safe from
both behavior & people found at efnet. I don't know if its possible
to create good professional nanog channel there that is favorable
to newcomers and can have serious talk by experienced people (and
there are definitely things in network engineering you can talk
about no matter how good you are - if you think there are not,
then it just shows your own lock of knowledge and interest in the 
subject), but I do wish all the luck to people who want to try.

P.S. Yes I did want this thread to stop but seeing as its holiday time...
Well, I'll leave up to the moderators to decide if and where this
conversation should continue.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net