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.
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.
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.
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.
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