Why Won't You Answer My Question?

Re:Why Won't You Answer My Question? by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday April 27, 2017 @10:44PM (#14216543)

Hah. You think most techies want to get informative error reporting from their users?

This is the email I sent to my hosting company a couple of years ago when WHM (a component of cPanel) started doing something silly that broke my SSHD:

  sshd and ip whitelisting - there's a bug it seems

  If I go to whitelist my current ip in whm, it asks me to restart sshd to
  make the changes stick. If I do that, sshd fails to restart with an
  error like this:

  Directive 'UseDNS' is not allowed within a Match block [FAILED]

  I presume what's actually causing this is some script in whm that goes
  and adds something like this bit in sshd_config:

  Match User [my user name] 
		PasswordAuthentication yes 
		UseDNS  no

  The "UseDNS no" should be _before_ the "Match user ... "etc (that's the
  match block from the error message).

  I've no idea what part of whm is doing this but it's doing it wrong- get
  someone who knows perl to fix it, it should be dead easy.

  My doctor has advised me to stay away from perl for life

That was after I spent an hour or so chatting with their tech support to try and unscrew my SSHD after it suddendly stopped authenticating me (probably because they updated to a borked version of whm). So yeah, they knew what I was talking about alright (and, yes, I sent that to the right people, check).

I never heard back from them. I think that's an informative message, isn't it? I (a) relayed the error message (b) pointed at the cause of the error message (c) explained how to fix it

But they didn't even write back to say that yeah, they knew and were going to fix it. Isn't that a shame?

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Re:Why Won't You Answer My Question? by arjie on Friday April 28, 2017 @03:38AM (#14217594)

"Should be easy" is a bozo bit phrase. Whether it should be that way or not, you're going into the slow bucket at that point.

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Re:Why Won't You Answer My Question? by stevekemp on Friday April 28, 2017 @09:42AM (#14219269)

Indeed I had a discussion on reddit recently, trying to help somebody. Their exact words;

   "It should take somebody 20 minutes to fix this if they know python"

At that point I was done with the conversation, though I was tempted to ask what their bug-fixing-budget was..

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Re:Why Won't You Answer My Question? by khedoros1 on Friday April 28, 2017 @02:08PM (#14221704)

When someone asks me to provide them a fixed version of their code, that's when their problem completely stops being my problem (unless there's something unusually interesting about the code, maybe).

What bothers me is if someone starts acting like they're entitled to my help and time. What bothers me more is when they act like they're entitled to a complete solution, rather than hints, explanations, and recommendations. No, I'm not going to code your homework assignment for you, sorry.

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Re:Why Won't You Answer My Question? by roel_v on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:30AM (#14236811)

Oh oh time to commiserate. I reported a software problem with a QNAP NAS to their tech support. I dug out the logs (that weren't included with their 'official' diagnostics tool, these were logs somewhere deep down in an undocumented directory for which you had to set an environment variable for them to actually be generated). Those logs included stack traces from their Python code, complete with the name and description which essentially said 'socked timed out'. I described why the issue was happening (including links to the documentation of the 3rd party service they are integrating with, as well as quotes from tech support of that 3rd party company saying what the issue is). I then went on to describe how to reproduce, and under which circumstances it can be reproduced; complete with a high-level conceptual description of how things fit together.

The response? 'Could you please send a video showing when the problem happens'.

bangs head on desk

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