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Getting hold of us
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Getting hold of the gang behind Varnish is pretty straight forward,
we try to help as much as time permits and have tried to streamline
this process as much as possible.

But before you grab hold of us, spend a moment composing your thoughts and
formulate your question, there is nothing as pointless as simply telling
us "Varnish does not work for me" with no further information to give
any clue to why.

And before you even do that, do a couple of searches to see if your
question is already answered, if it has been, you will get your answer
much faster that way.

IRC Channel
===========

The most immediate way to get hold of us, is to join our IRC channel:

	``#varnish on server irc.linpro.no``

The main timezone of the channel is Europe+America.

If you can explain your problem in a few clear sentences, without too
much copy&paste, IRC is a good way to try to get help. If you do need
to paste log files, VCL and so on, please use a pastebin_.

If the channel is all quiet, try again some time later, we do have lives,
families and jobs to deal with also.

You are more than welcome to just hang out, and while we don't mind
the occational intrusion of the real world into the flow, keep
it mostly on topic, and dont paste random links unless they are
*really* spectacular and intelligent.

Mailing Lists
=============

Getting on or off our mailinglist happens through MailMan_.

If you are going to use Varnish, subscribing to our ``varnish-announce``
mailing list is probably a very good idea.  The typical pattern is that
people spend some time getting Varnish running, and then more or less
forget about it.   Therefore the announce list is a good way to be
reminded about new releases, bad bugs or security holes.

The ``varnish-misc`` mailing list is for general banter, questions,
suggestions, ideas and so on.  If you are new to Varnish it may pay
off to subscribe to -misc, simply to have an ear to the telegraph-pole
and learn some smart tricks.  This is a good place to ask for help
with more complex issues, that require quoting of files and long
explanations.

Make sure to pick a good subject line, and if the subject of the
thread changes, please change the subject to match, some of us deal
with hundreds of emails per day, after spam-filters, and we need all
the help we can get to pick the interesting ones.

The ``varnish-dev`` mailing list is used by the developers and is
usually quite focused on source-code and such.  Everybody on
the -dev list is also on -misc, so cross-posting only serves to annoy
those people.

Trouble Tickets
===============

Please do not open a trouble ticket, unless you have spotted an actual
bug in Varnish.  Ask on IRC first if you are in doubt.

The reason for this policy, is to avoid the bugs being drowned in a
pile of sensible suggestions for future enhancements and call for help
from people who forget to check back if they get it and so on.

We track suggestions and ideas in our `"Shopping-List" wiki page`_, and user
support via email and IRC.

Commercial Support
==================

The following companies offer commercial Varnish support, and are listed
here for your convenience.  If you want your company listed here, drop
an email to phk@FreeBSD.org.

	Varnish Software
	sales@varnish-software.com


.. _Mailman: http://lists.varnish-cache.org/mailman/listinfo
.. _pastebin: http://gist.github.com/
.. _"Shopping-List" wiki page: http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/PostTwoShoppingList
