George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org> writes: > I am going to be doing some things in the next few months that might get > the company I work for to start supporting Debian in a limited manner. One > thing I have noticed as a Sys Admin consultant is that there are two > different kinds of consulting and consultants. > > First you have Rent-a-Geek where you bring a single individual in for a > specific project. Then you have Geek Inc. where the customer establishes > an ongoing relationship with an outside firm that provides an array of IT > services. Yes, I agree totally. I'm stuck in the "Rent-a-Geek" rut myself. But I realize the way to make money and provide better service is to join up with others. Otherwise, I have difficulty servicing anything other than small jobs. Even those seem to drag on longer than they should. I've worked in an IS department too, so I know that large companies tend to shy away from the excitable, hairy "Rent-a-Geek" types. They'd rather deal with the suit-and-tie "Geek, Inc." (which has a bunch of hacker-types locked in a closet working behind the scenese). We will only do well if we present the second "Geek, Inc." image. > I am going to try to convince out management to offer some > fixed-price canned servers based on a rack-mount PC running Debian Linux. > For a fixed price, we would install a DNS server or an SMTP mail server or > a POP3 or FTP server. This matches the profile of what a lot of my customers (and several potential customers) want to do. Of course, to do this, they need more support than what I can currently give them. Debian is the best OS (IMHO) to do this sort of stuff. That's why a support network might really be a profitable arrangement to set up. > Can we turn this into a world-wide "vendor support" network? I don't see why not. There's already really good world-wide volunteer support. We just need a little bit of organization to do some of it for pay. The trick right now is just getting started. Cheers, - Jim
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