Server Fault now has a place for real time chat over at chat.serverfault.com. We have had a room going for a few weeks now over at meta.chat.stackoverflow.com but it is nice for us to have our own place now where we can create specific chat rooms now.

A place for live chat is a great thing to have for system administrators. A lot of system administrators seem to be out working on their own so this is a nice place to socialize. It also can be a place to talk about those questions that don’t really have straightforward answers. For example:

If you haven’t seen the chat system that Stack Overflow’s employees Benjamin Dumke and Marc Gravell have developed you are missing out. I bet a lot of system administrators, especially grumpy ones with a *nix slant like me, might have a first thought similar to what I had:

Why do we need some Web 2.0 garbage to replace our wonderful text based IRC?

It turns out there a lot of reasons besides all the damn netsplits. This chat retains all the history so when you join a room you can see what was being talked about, you can also search the transcript. There is a lot more as well — I recommend you go check it out.