Building on Stack Overflow’s success, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have launched Server Fault in public beta, a new questions&answers web site targeted at system administrators and IT staff.
The new website follows the format of Stack Overflow but it has a different community in mind, the hardware guys, the system admins and generally people in an IT staff. After being in private beta and gathering over 2,500 questions, the web site is going to be in public beta for a short period of time because it has the same software powering the programmer community, only the theme is different.
People already registered with Stack Overflow will have some of their reputation transferred to Server Fault because they are considered to have experience by using a similar site, but the intent is to allow each person to build separate reputations for two web sites.
The site runs on a Lenovo server, dual CPU, 24 GB of memory and 6 hard drives, as the DB server, and another Lenovo server, 1 CPU quad core, 8 GB of memory and dual mirrored HDD, as the web server.
Examples of questions asked/answered on the site:
How do you document a network?
Monitor an incoming SSH session in real time
Any guidelines to think about when considering virtualizing an exchange server?
There are other web sites trying to address the same problems. Two of them are Sage and LOPSA. Sage, a Special Interest Group of the USENIX Association, offers a much wider support for sysadmins including conferences and training, while LOPSA, League of Professional System Administrators, a non-profit organization mainly offering a forum and a discussion board for members of the same community.