Server Fault is now in public beta!

When Jeff Atwood and I launched Stack Overflow last fall, we really wanted it to be a site for and by programmers. But the engine behind the site, the Q&A engine with voting, editing, and tagging, could obviously be used in a lot of other professions.

The first field we picked is close to our heart: system and network administration; as programmers, we often end up doing system administration ourselves. And it’s the perfect domain for a Q&A engine… there are a million detailed problems that depend highly on lore to get right. There’s no way to accidentally discover aspnet_regiis.exe -I until someone shows you the trick. How much time have you wasted trying to figure out which process is holding a file open preventing you from deleting an otherwise empty directory? Can you use dd to clone a disk drive?

Thus, Server Fault. If you already have a Stack Overflow account, you’re all set up, although your reputation score, badges, and favorite tags are separate. It has all the great features from Stack Overflow which I talked about at Google last month (video).

Jeff: “I am sorry to inform you that you may be a system administrator or IT professional.”