11th February 2012

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Network Dictionary – TFM

12th February 2010 By 1 Comment

TFM is an abbreviation for The Fine Manual

Some people might choose a word other than “Fine” but I’m too polite.

Note also that this is a truncation of the more common invocation “RTFM”, a commonly known abbreviation for “Read The Fine Manual”

Reference:
http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/blogs/quirks-of-the-cisco-6500-sup720-module-ports.html

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://cisco.markom.info Marko Milivojevic

    I am going to disagree with you here. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you just miss the fine print ;-) .

    The actual definition of “F” depends on the vendor. Certain vendors have those Fine manuals you are talking about. Some vendors don’t have those impolite F. manuals. However… there is a 3rd kind of F manual.

    That FRUSTRATING Manual that doesn’t correspond to the real life. I can name several examples from my years in the industry. For example, if you ever have unpleasant job of figuring out how to configure Zhone MALC, you will just get frustrated by the fact that F manual doesn’t correspond to what you are supposed to type. If you have even more unpleasant duty of dealing with certain vendor whose name I don’t even want to type, but it starts with E and ends with riccsson, what will continue to frustrate you is that they care more about the revision history of the document and titles of their employees, than what the manual says.

    While they can be accused for many things, Cisco has Fine manuals. Of course, excusing them for documenting that one can use IPv6 address as OSPF router-id… ;-)

    –
    Marko.