OK, for future reference, do you 'experienced people' ignore threads only based on issues where memory wend bad or do you blanket ignore any thread where anything less than enterprise hardware is mentioned as being used?
Ahhhhhh Stickies ........ I feel all warm and gooey now. Thanks for the sticky enlightenment. Don't know how I missed them. I am glad they aren't snakes.
Just to clarify, we "experienced people" don't have meetings in dark rooms where we decide who to ignore and when to answer and not answer. It's more of a situation where we all complain about the same stuff in emails to each other. That being said, its pretty easy to see what is ignored because if I want to ignore it there's a good chance everyone else will too. Been around these guys enough to see what they do and don't feel like answering to since we get the same darn questions every week(sometimes twice a day).
That being said, if you do stupid things that resulted in trashing your pool and we know there's little or no chance of recovery, we aren't likely to spend any time on you. Bad RAM with non-ECC is an excellent example. We'll tell you to run a RAM test and when it fails we won't go further. It wasn't our data, we don't have a commitment to fix your data(we are volunteers) and there's virtually no chance of success anyway. If you wanted to pay us you might get more support. But considering the time that someone will have to be invested in recovery, you probably aren't willing to drop $1000 to find out
if you can get your data back as you couldn't be bothered with going with ECC RAM which was probably cheaper than the cost of data recovery. It's nothing more than having car insurance, and we all know that its smarter to have car insurance just from a financial perspective.
If your hardware doesn't match our recommendations and the problem doesn't appear to be related to your poor choice of hardware then we'll
usually help you. But we also have limits. You're kind of off on a bad foot the second you tell us you are using hardware from 2005 with 2GB of RAM and ZFS. I'll often tell you to upgrade and ignore you until you actually have appropriate hardware. Won't take much for us to write you off and ignore you though. If you didn't care enough to spend money to protect your data why should we care enough to spend several hours trying to fix your data? You made your choice that your data wasn't worth a few hundred dollars to get good parts, so why would you pay a few thousand to get it back later?
In essence, you'll get out of us what you put into protecting your data. If you showed that you didn't care, we won't either. And if you want to have an attitude with us over it, feel free to. But you didn't have an attitude with yourself when you got stupid and did everything we told you not to do. And Ill basically put you on my "sh*t" list and ignore you, which won't do you any favors even if you go back and do everything right after losing your data.
I won't speak for everyone else here, but I will say this. I am a volunteer. I spend at least 6 hours a day, every day, on this forum and countless hours every day on IRC. I'm here in the mornings. I'm here in the evenings. I'm often here even in the middle of thenight. And if I don't want to answer I won't. I'm tired of certain questions(plugin updates, transmission problems, permission problems, crappy hardware choices and now painted in a corner, bad RAM, no UPS, etc). I'll close my browser tab and won't feel guilty about it. We've got stickies for most of that stuff. There's Google, the FreeNAS manual and learning for yourself for the rest. I don't get paid to teach you a new operating system. Just like if I told you to teach me how to setup a windows server in all aspects you wouldn't do it for free, so why should you expect the same from me. You could spend weeks teaching me how to use Windows Server and use all of the features it offers. There are schools that teach people how to use Windows and charge $20k+ for it over a course of months. If you want to pay that kind of money, I'd put together a lecture and lessons for you on FreeNAS. But you and I both know you aren't about to pay me that kind of money as you could easily pay someone to build your FreeNAS server for less. Also, someone is already paid to maintain the FreeNAS documentation. Can't beat free documentation, but you can't complain if it doesn't teach you every aspect of using the OS either. Microsoft's manual that comes with Windows doesn't tell you how to do everything either. So when people complain about poor documentation, they can eat a bag of whatever fecal matter they can find because they don't complain to Microsoft over the same situation. In fact, most people paid for MCSE certifications(and maybe even training) but aren't willing to pay for FreeNAS training and knowledge.
