You know guys, a user like this one who has gotten this far without knowing basic networking isn't going to suddenly decide to pick it up now. It's like when I encounter a person with a Ph.D. in mathematics who has never programmed a computer---I know that the person had 10000 opportunities to learn how to program the computer on the way to the stage they are at, and for some reason, has not, on purpose. So I figure they have their reasons, and I leave them in peace about it (but, of course, tell them to find a new mentor, lol).
Had I been involved in the thread earlier, I would have simply told the user to go to the global configuration and put in 8.8.8.8 for his nameserver, and if it still didn't work, then we'd go ahead and troubleshoot the egress/gateway. The user just wants the problem fixed---if he wants to understand the fix, he'll come back with a follow-up question.
In the future I'd suggest sizing up your user, and giving a user that you can assess as "not networking savvy", a likely-to-work, one shot solution, or giving them a link to the relevant section of the documentation, or giving them words to google. We're not making any friends telling him that he's a jackass (in so many words) and that this is "networking 101". It's one thing for someone to walk away from FreeNAS because it required a networking (or other) understanding that they weren't interested in acquiring. It's quite another for them to feel like they walked away because they feel we were opaque and hostile.
I understand and acknowledge that we are FreeBSD, and that we thus philosophically expect people to do a lot of their own legwork. But, this is a FreeBSD appliance, not FreeBSD itself, and so, we do have some responsibility here to do a little handholding, gracefully.
When you can see the user is clearly not up-to-speed on networking, don't blast him with jargon/words. Size him up, and decide what words he's likely to understand and how much explanation he's going to need, based upon a reasonable assessment of what he probably does or does not know, based on the content and tone if the OP's question.
I'm just saying, this user should have been given more of a break, and our responses to his question should have been constructed, purposefully, with his likely experience- and skill-level in mind.