On Wed, Jan 12, 2000 at 12:54:37PM -0500, J. Scott Kasten wrote:
[...]
> I'm not sure I'd be so brazen about it. There's been a number of
> people who have written into this list indicating that they've been
> cut off when it was discovered that they were running something
> other than the "norm". Just go back through the archives. Now is
> this true or just the usual cultural fairy tales? Who knows. I'm
> sure many of the support and other engineer types probably know
> there's no valid technical reason not to provide service to other OS
> types. However, there's equally valid reasons from the marketing
> and support management side of things. First, when you sign up as a
> customer, they as a telco take on a legal obligation to provide you
> with a functional service in a set time frame. They don't wish to
> open themselves to liabilities stemming from failure to meet that
> obligation when their techies have to support platforms that they
> are not properly trained on. Hog wash asside, this is a simple
> marketing/business decision based on risk. Next, we come to the
> bandwidth issues. Win95,98, NT Workstation, Mac OS are not
> inherently servers. Linux and others are. They don't want you
> running hidden servers for the price of a dialup. I was
> specifically tould that my connection would be monitored and cut off
> if they found incomming syn packets indicating that I was running a
> server, unless of course I paid twice the going rate as a useage
> tax, in which case they didn't care. So, that's what I did, upgrade
> to a business customer.
My comments are strictly limited to BellSouth. Running any public
server is verboten, but running a 'server OS' is not. If you run a
webserver or such, you likely get the axe. It is no doubt true that
the installers make claims like was reported here, but they are wrong.
--
Hal B
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