[plug] OT ADSL Price & Service- compare Westnet / Eftel / Arachnet/others?

[Anthony Jones]

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On Sunday 12 May 2002 12:18, Luke Dudney wrote:
> Added to this is the huge number or permutations of distributions / 
> diallers / browsers / GUIs / etc available on a Linux system. Sure a 
> helpdesk could decide on a specific subset of these to support 
> officially, but then how many of your customers would you be helping?
> "The jack of all trades is master of none."
> 
> Cheers
> Luke (a WestNet insider)

The thing which really yanks my chain is when companies (e.g. Telstra) treat 
you like you're a lepper because you're running Linux - they usually say 
things like "We don't support Linux. Goodbye". I've been using Linux for a 
few years now and what I have come to expect from a good company is "we 
assure you it's possible to get this to work with Linux" - Compaq in the US 
will tell you which of their laptops are known to work with Linux and which 
are not. You'd usually need Redhat for it to be easy to install (new hardware 
is often a pain on Debian).

The really good companies say "this is how we got our system to work with 
Linux". iiNet for example has information on how to set up a few things on 
Linux. For a Windoze user this is not the level of hand-holding that they're 
used to. For a Linux user this gives you the confidence to (in the case of 
ADSL) come up with a few hundred dollars to sign up for the service.

I suggest that WestNet would be wise to say "We don't offer phone support for 
Linux but we have small resources page and we are happy to answer OS-neutral 
questions (without implying that you're an idiot for asking what the ip 
addresses are for our nameservers). We verified that he ADSL modem which we 
supply can be configured to work with Linux.".

There are ISPs that simply don't work properly with Linux. I know someone who 
lives in Santa Monica, California who couldn't get their DHCP working 
correcty to they just choose an IP address in the right range and started 
using it. It worked but it's certainly not the way it's supposed to work.

Anthony
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