why I fear open source can't win the war

[Srinivasan Krishnan]

> This tale bothers me on a number of fronts.
> 
> a) that a major national provider can hook up with a convicted monopolist to 
> "ensure" that standard email software doesn't function
> 

You don't know the half of it.  My workplace had a routed Bell internet
line with a /28 subnet, which we used to host our web and mail servers,
all running Linux.  A few months ago, I noticed a huge speed drop on the
line, and called Bell tech support (their enterprise support, not
Sympatico).  I explained my problem to the support rep, and also told
him that the line had worked fine since 2003.

The response I got was: we need to test your line.  Please take all your
computers off of it, and hook up a single Windows PC to it for testing.
When I asked why, he responded that he wanted to make sure that none of
our servers had a virus that was creating network traffic, thus using up
available bandwidth.  I explained very politely that we had live web and
mail servers connected to the line, and that I could not possibly take
them down.  I also explained that (a) all our servers ran Linux and were
tightly secured, so the possibility of a virus or rootkit (he did not
know what that meant) were extremely low, (b) that I had checked each
box and sniffed outgoing traffic on each system with netstat and tcpdump
(again, the support rep did not know what these were) in any case, just
to make sure, and (c) we did not have *any* Windows system connected, so
there was almost no chance of malware tying up the bandwidth and slowing
things down.

Well, the gentleman from Bell would have none of it.  He asked me if I
knew what I was talking about and said that Linux was as suceptible to
virii as Windows, and that it was probably a "Linux virus" that was
causing the problem.  No amount of arguing or explanation worked, and I
finally asked to speak to his supervisor.  That worthy was no better,
and said that we had to do what tech support had demanded, in order to
debug the line.  Ultimately I told him we would have to shift critical
systems to our backup line, that it would take a day or so to do it, and
would they please check their connectivity and the local loop in the
meantime.

The line was fixed in a few hours after that.  I did not have to do
anything, so it was something on their end that was causing the problem.

The message I got from this incident was that Bell seemed to be going
out of their way to be Linux unfriendly.  As a result, I have now
shifted to an MCI T1.  The bandwidth is great for uplink, their support
is awesome in terms of quality as well as response time, and their
pricing is not all that much higher (significantly lower than Bell's T1
pricing, incidentally).

If you're running Linux and use Bell for internet connectivity, caveat
emptor!

Cheers,

Krishnan


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