On 2003.09.04 00:52 Scott Harney wrote: > "Shannon B. Roddy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Yeah... yeah.... ruin my attempt at bashing M$. Thanks a lot > > dude.... :-) > > Sorry. I've met they're net engineers. they're good folks. And since > I used to do that myself, I gotta back em :) There's a vast gulf > between the "techs" customers encounter and these folks >
You should not let this cloud your judgment. The techs may be competent, but they must obey their corporate masters who bow to "market forces" such as Microsoft extortions. Your former peers are not evil, as far as I know, but Cox policy blows for non-technical reasons. The site www.cox.net is running Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) on Solaris 8. Average uptimes are around 30 days with 130 day peaks. The site www.cox.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000. Average uptimes are around 10 days with 40 day peaks. Netcraft does not report their DNS or mail servers, but I know that Cox is snared in M$'s fangs and suffers for it. They use it for their customer service databases and those blow out all the time. They used to have and may still have crappy M$ only customer account configurations on their web site. For whatever reason, their DNS sucks and it's better to point to something reliable at LSU or elsewhere. The "Lunchbox" transition to their own services should go down in net fiasco legend. The transition from At Home to Cox is one of least smooth things I've ever seen. It must have cost them a fortune and left and left a terrible taste in everyone's mouth. They paid people to drive around and put fliers on everyone's doors more than once. That would be OK, except the fliers looked like threats, saying approximately, "Do this or your service will fail." They then sent out that silly lunchbox with windows and Mac only binary junk that spewed sunshine, threats and added back doors to everyone's computers but contained no useful information. Then, to top it all off, those who actually used the lunchbox had service disruptions for months while people like me who did nothing suffered no ill effects until Cox intentionally shut the old At Home network off. Their service techs still expect to find their back doors when you call them about some other failure or misconfiguration on their part. Cox may wake up to the source of the problem but I doubt it. Their former CEO is now the mayor of New Orleans and he's promised to "improve" the whole city's IT infrastructure the M$ way. Clearly their big dogs don't learn. Chances are that as soon as Cox's win2k boxes get close to stable, some dumb dumb is going to move them to XP and they will start all over again. Your former peers deserve praise. With the constraints they work under, it's a miracle that Cox can provide any service. Their bosses, however, deserve multiple assaults with a clue stick. There you go, Shannon, there is still much to bash.
