why I fear open source can't win the war

[Rick Tomaschuk]

A simple router is all that is required to maintain a connection with
Rogers or Bell...not a window$ machine. I had a similar blow up with
Rogers last year as I have a Win98 hard drive ready to boot at all times
and proved them wrong in a flash and then poked and prodded them about
window$ vs Linux. I got the tech to admit that there was no problem at
my end but rather they had been upgrading their equipment and this led
to my connectivity problem. You should explain to Bell tech that if they
are not qualified to assess the problem they should look for employment
elsewhere and that as a customer you have the right to run what ever
software you please. If they say they don't support Linux tell them they
are stupid and don't know what they are talking about then ask for the
next supervisor up the chain till you get results. Sometimes just
suggesting that you want to talk to a supervisor gets them to move
faster. Educate these a_holes. Micro$oft is only relevant to non-tech
types. Anyone in the know about basic computer operating systems is
aware that business tasks can be done with a PIII running anything
except window$. There is no 'war'. What we have is a self image problem
in that (Linux/Unix) techs feel worthless unless the daily paper is
plastered with ads promoting their favorite operating system. How many
ads to you see about basic toothbrushes? or automotive engine pistons?
or fuel injectors? or copper wire? or the brand of plastic used to make
a toilet seat? or the milk used to make ice cream? or ..... Start a
business,  however small and use only software you want to support your
product/service offering.
RickT
http://www.TorontoNUI.ca

On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 10:25 -0400, Srinivasan Krishnan wrote:
> > 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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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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