[TriLUG] OT: Dial-Up ISP

[Ben Pitzer]

Mike,

Well, take it from a career ISP man:  If you have enough customers to keep
yourself in business, it's not practical to support every possible piece of
software that they might be running.  Fact is, there are half a dozen
different modem dialers for Linux.  Add to that the different modems that
Linux might or might not support, 50 different distros, and the fact that
two people running the same distro might have boxes that look completely
different from one another, and you've got a support quagmire that's just
ridiculous.  You can't support Linux in a cost-effective manner (as an ISP,
that is) the way that you can with Windows or Mac.  Those two are difficult
enough, given the differences between Mac OS versions and versions of
Windows that folks might be using, not to mention 20 or so different email
clients, news clients, browsers, IM clients, etc.  Basically, while choice
is a good thing, as an ISP, it's not practical to support everything.  You
unfortunately have to pick the applications and OSes that are most widely
used by your customer base and support those.  Good ISPs know what their
customers are running, and support it.  When I worked for MindSpring back in
the day, we had quite a number of Linux users on staff who wrote up docs for
configuring Linux dialers to connect to MindSpring's dialup services, but we
did not support those customers dialers.  We would provide them with the
configuration docs that we had, and anything else was up to them.  It wasn't
ideal for the Linux user, obviously, and as support reps, you hate to have
to tell any customer that you can't help them, but the fact is that the
training it would have taken to get us to be able to support those customers
would have made us all overqualified for our jobs, in many respects.

Now, don't get me wrong, here.  I don't think that a company should turn
away Linux users, or that they should hang up the phone when someone says
that they're using Linux, but there's only so much troubleshooting that can
go on if you're not trained on Linux.  Half the battle in tech support is
determining if the caller who claims to be a consultant is really an idiot
or if they actually do know half as much as they think they do.  I've had
plenty of calls where a "sysadmin" or MCSE or computer engineer with a
problem that just couldn't possibly be his/her problem turned out to be
exactly that, because they didn't check on everything, or didn't know that a
particular modem string would get their modem to connect when it otherwise
couldn't.

Ack.  Looks like you got one of my hot buttons on this one.  I guess I'm
saying that you have to be very careful in how you define 'Linux friendly'.
My personal take on it is that anyone who doesn't hang up on you the minute
you say that you're using Linux is 'Linux friendly', even if they can't help
you troubleshoot your configuration or tell you exactly what's wrong.  But
that's just my take.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer

---------------------------------------------

"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
 --Ben Franklin--




> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org]On
> Behalf Of Mike M
> Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2004 11:04 AM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] OT: Dial-Up ISP
>
>
> On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 04:01:47PM -0400, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> >
> > And we're quite Linux friendly.  :)
> >
>
> That is refreshing to hear.  I really don't know why the ISP
> community at large is so anxious about Linux.  It seems to me
> that the wise approach would be to embrace Linux albiet at
> a higher level of expectation of user cognition and capability.
>
> When a Linux user calls for help, treat 'em like we treat 'em here.
> Can you ping out?  You don't know what ping is?  Call us back when
> you do or switch to Windows.
>
> No molly-coddling for Linux users but no rejection either.  I think
> Linux users would appreciate this approach.  I guess the big concern
> for the ISP is getting themselves in the position of training and
> debugging 1001 different Linux configurations for users that are too
> lazy to learn on their own.  Come to think of it, I'd want protection
> from those folks too :-).
>
> --
> Mike
>
> Moving forward in pushing back the envelope of the corporate paradigm.
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