It's pop quiz time! Put away your notes, and let's begin.

a) Do you own this book?*

b) Do you know who this man is?

c) Does this FAQ look familiar to you?

3) OUR LITTLE FRIEND, THE COMPUTER
3.1) Are there any OSes that don't suck?
3.2) Are there any vendors that don't suck?
3.3) How about any hardware?
3.4) Just HOW MUCH does this system suck?
3.5) Where can I find clueful tech support?
3.6) What can I do to help my computers behave?

d) Does the acronym BOFH mean anything to you?

e) Do you think this is funny?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above, I am sorry to inform you that you may be a system administrator or IT professional. But I do have one bit of potentially, at least theoretically good news for you:

Server Fault is now in public beta!

Server Fault is a sister site to Stack Overflow, which we launched back in September 2008. It uses the same engine, but it's not just for programmers any more:

Server Fault is for system administrators and IT professionals, people who manage or maintain computers in a professional capacity. If you are in charge of ...

• servers
• networks
• many desktop PCs (other than your own)

... then you're in the right place to ask your question! Well, as long as the question is about your servers, your networks, or desktops you support, anyway.

Please note that Server Fault is not for general computer troubleshooting questions; if you paid for that desktop hardware, and it's your personal workstation, it is unlikely that your question is appropriate for Server Fault.

I occasionally dabble in system administration and IT professional stuff; my last blog entry was about RAID, for example. As a programmer who loves hardware as much as software, I've wanted this site for months, and I'm thrilled to see it go live, as I explained on a recent RunAs radio podcast.

Although there is certainly some crossover, we believe that the programming community and the IT/sysadmin community are different beasts. Just because you're a hotshot programmer doesn't mean you have mastered networking and server configuration. And I've met a few sysadmins who could script circles around my code. That's why Server Fault gets its own domain, user profiles, and reputation system.

So if you're a bona-fide BOFH, or just a wanna-be BOFH luser like me, join us on Server Fault. Who knows, maybe we lusers can learn something from each other.

* (For the record, yes, I do own that book -- although I am easily the world's worst UNIX system administrator.)