On Wed, Jan 12, 2000 at 12:47:47PM -0500, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> I think this is all disinformation being supplied to installers by
> their employers (usually contractors). I've called tech support and I
> tell them just what I am running, the answer was 'I run Redhat at home
> too' ;). They could actually care less. They don't 'support' it in the
> sense that they will not help setup or troubleshoot unsupported
> platforms -- mainly because they are not trained for it.
>
> This has come up in the ADSL support NG (bellsouth.net.support.adsl),
> and both techs that post there have said -- no problem. In fact linux
> comes up there fairly often. Occasionally, Solaris and BSD. They have
> gone so far as to say if anyone is refused an installation on these
> grounds, to call the ADSL helpdesk to get it straightened out. There
> may be a bit of redtape, but you can get it installed on any platform.
>
> Hal B
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> --
> Linux helps those who help themselves
I'm not sure I'd be so brazen about it. There's been a number of people
who have written into this list indicating that they've been cut off
when it was discovered that they were running something other than the
"norm". Just go back through the archives. Now is this true or just
the usual cultural fairy tales? Who knows. I'm sure many of the
support and other engineer types probably know there's no valid technical
reason not to provide service to other OS types. However, there's
equally valid reasons from the marketing and support management side
of things. First, when you sign up as a customer, they as a telco take
on a legal obligation to provide you with a functional service in a
set time frame. They don't wish to open themselves to liabilities
stemming from failure to meet that obligation when their techies have
to support platforms that they are not properly trained on. Hog wash
asside, this is a simple marketing/business decision based on risk.
Next, we come to the bandwidth issues. Win95,98, NT Workstation, Mac OS
are not inherently servers. Linux and others are. They don't want you
running hidden servers for the price of a dialup. I was specifically tould
that my connection would be monitored and cut off if they found incomming
syn packets indicating that I was running a server, unless of course
I paid twice the going rate as a useage tax, in which case they didn't
care. So, that's what I did, upgrade to a business customer.
--
J. Scott Kasten
jsk AT tetracon-eng DOT net
"That wasn't an attack. It was preemptive retaliation!"
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