[Info-vax] Configured shadowing, neglected to update satellite.. Can't figure out how to fix.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2014-02-21 04:22:18 +0000, cyberdefensedave at gmail.com said:

> This may surprise you, but I actually did read the manual.  The setting 
> in error was an oversight.  I suppose you've never misconfigured 
> something and, regardless of how long you stared at it, you couldn't 
> see your own mistake.

There are many opportunities to take offense where none is intended.   
Text is certainly subject to misunderstanding, particularly that that 
doesn't get professionally proofread, reviewed, tweaked, A-B tested and 
otherwise extruded into processed American Cheese-text food product, 
but I digress.  Choosing to infer offense might however dissuade others 
from providing further future help for fear of offending (further?), or 
just because the time and effort spent on the responses are not 
perceived as valuable, even if the response might not be immediately 
helpful to your quest.   This might result in some others might not 
then mention there's a fairly advanced course in shadowing 
configurations and troubleshooting in the aforementioned comp.os.vms 
newsgroup archives, for instance.  Of course these things don't 
generally end well for anyone involved in the discussion.   Yes, it is 
entirely your call on how you choose to perceive the intent of a reply 
or an answer, on who you think is trolling you and who is actually 
intending to troll you, and your choice to post or to plonk.

To answer your (presumably rhetorical) question, yes, that's happened.  
I've hit stuff I couldn't figure out.   Which generally led me to 
re-read the manual, the documentation, the source code or the likes of 
the newsgroup archives here or StackOverflow or such for more active OS 
environments, and to specifically verify my assumptions.  
Interestingly, I've found that creating a reproducer to post the 
question has often led me to the answer to the question— gathering the 
details for the posting, including verifying the settings and related 
and — where I run into more problems being in the source code — 
creating a standalone reproducer have often led me to the answer.  This 
effort so that I don't waste the time of the folks I'm planning to ask 
the question of — that's part of valuing the time that others might 
spend on the question on my behalf.  Where the question was weird 
enough to have had few available resources or common enough to have 
been seen posted by folks (those that don't realize their question 
might be a common one), I've edited out the expletives and the WTFs and 
the "which idiot thought this was a good idea?" and the rest, and 
posted a write up to the HL web site.

Again, your call.

I hereby apologize for pointing to the documentation and available 
resources, and for not knowing that you've already read the manual, and 
shall endeavor to never again point you at any of the documentation.   
OK, so now I'm intentionally trolling — I'll reference the docs again.  
I'd post an emoji here, but the VMS folks would just see that UTF-8 as 
more line noise.  Whoops, trolling again.  :-)


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