* From: Joe Greco * Date: Sat Jun 16 07:58:20 2007 : Further, in the context of the discussion, I don't : really know if any ISP is recommending Windows, but : I know that some major ones won't even lift a finger : if you're using UNIX. The conversation wasn't they were recommending Windows, they were *requiring* it and won't support anything else. What about a Mac? Why wouldn't they support that OS? : My favorite example is Road Runner, where I personally had : the displeasure...when I called RR support, they wouldn't : debug it at an IP level until I hooked up a Windows PC : So they wouldn't even try to debug an IP level issue, which : I would kind of consider to be maybe... their core business. Did you stay with them or switch ISPs? scott

If Joe Sixpack has a Mac, calls his ISP for help, is told the ISP only supports Micro$loth, asks for escalation and can't get that (or even doesn't ask for escalation) I would think Joe would move to another ISP. Thus my earlier statement that the ISP which does this we- support-Micro$loth-only crazyness is doomed to failure.

Perhaps that would be true if Micro$loth was a minority player in the OS world. However, the facts here are that MS comes deployed on a huge percentage of the computers in the world, and even if FreeBSD/Linux/etc enthusiasts are wiping it off a certain percentage of those, Macs still represent a very small percentage. If the graphs at http://www.systemshootouts.org/mac_sales.html are correct, we can probably draw the conclusion that less than 5% of the installed computing base is Mac. If we looked at Internet-facing browser usage, http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp suggests that this is a reasonable conclusion, with Windows making up about 90% of all browsing clients, 75% WinXP. Further, in the context of the discussion, I don't really know if any ISP is recommending Windows, but I know that some major ones won't even lift a finger if you're using UNIX. My favorite example is Road Runner, where I personally had the displeasure of running into a situation where a UNIX VPN gateway was "dead" on the 'net, couldn't traceroute beyond the first hop, traceroutes to it died in RRland, and when I called RR support, they wouldn't debug it at an IP level until I hooked up a Windows PC, which promptly DHCP'd a *different* IP address, which (inconveniently) worked. Yet, at the time, releasing the DHCP lease on the VPN box didn't result in a different IP address (strange RR DHCP servers), so when the VPN box came back on, it got the same busted IP address. The TSR took this as evidence that "UNIX didn't work" and advised me that it wasn't a Road Runner issue, and refused to assist any further. Unable to make any progress, in frustration, I switched interfaces on the VPN box, and bam, it worked. I pushed the issue a bit, later, and eventually got a read-between-the-lines admission that that the problem was something to do with RR having switched around IP blocks, but somehow it was still the UNIX VPN box's fault for never rebooting or something like that. So they wouldn't even try to debug an IP level issue, which I would kind of consider to be maybe... their core business. Now, really, does anyone expect companies like that to assist with problems that aren't even the core of their business? Perhaps you think "doomed to failure" is a synonym for "wheelbarrows of cash to be had." ;-)