33.3 Getting Mailing List Help

There are a number of Samba- related mailing lists. Go to http://samba.org, click on your nearest mirror and then click on Support and next click on Samba-related mailing lists .

For questions relating to Samba TNG, go to http://www.samba-tng.org/. It has been requested that you do not post questions about Samba-TNG to the main-stream Samba lists.

If you do post a message to one of the lists, please observe the following guidelines :

• Always remember that the developers are volunteers, they are not paid and they never guarantee to produce a particular feature at a particular time. Any timelines are " best guess " and nothing more.

• Always mention what version of Samba you are using and what operating system it's running under. You should list the relevant sections of your smb.conf file, at least the options in [global] that affect PDC support.

• In addition to the version, if you obtained Samba via CVS, mention the date when you last checked it out.

• Try and make your questions clear and brief. Lots of long, convoluted questions get deleted before they are completely read! Do not post HTML encoded messages. Most people on mailing lists simply delete them.

• If you run one of those nifty " I'm on holidays " things when you are away, make sure its configured to not answer mailing list traffic. Auto-responses to mailing lists really irritate the thousands of people who end up having to deal with such bad netiquet bahavior.

• Don't cross post. Work out which is the best list to post to and see what happens. Do not post to both samba-ntdom and samba-technical. Many people active on the lists subscribe to more than one list and get annoyed to see the same message two or more times. Often someone will see a message and thinking it would be better dealt with on another list, will forward it on for you.

• You might include partial log files written at a debug level set to as much as 20. Please do not send the entire log but just enough to give the context of the error messages.

• If you have a complete Netmon trace (from the opening of the pipe to the error), you can send the *.CAP file as well.

• Please think carefully before attaching a document to an email. Consider pasting the relevant parts into the body of the message. The Samba mailing lists go to a huge number of people. Do they all need a copy of your smb.conf in their attach directory?