Re: Wierd PPP Problems

[Peter Ludwig <khan@midnight.ipxhome>]

On Fri, 14 May 1999, Jonathan Guthrie wrote:
> 
> On 13 May 1999, John Hasler wrote:
> 
< Snip out sections not of interest to my mail>
>
> > > Of course, I have no way of knowing if Mr. Hoover did this, but asking on
> > > this list about ISP connection difficulties without consulting the ISP
> > > first is probably not the best way to go.
>  
> > I'm sure that this is not true of your company, but almost all ISP's would
> > tell Mr. Hoover "We do not support Linux" and refuse to listen to his
> > problem.
> 
> You misunderstand.  I'm not telling you or Mr. Hoover to ask the ISP what
> the problem is, only what a disconnect code (or however it's done on
> their system) is.  Since that is independent of the operating system you
> use, it doesn't matter what you're running.  You should NEVER expect
> telephone technical support to solve your problems, you should only expect
> them to provide the information you need to solve your own problems.  (If
> they happen to be able to tell you what the problem is, that should be
> viewed as a happy windfall.)
>
For a little side-note here, in Oz (that's australia) we have set of
government regulations governing what steps are the best to take if we
have problems with our telecommunications company(s) (even ISP's fall
under this category).

However, I would most certainly agree with Mr Hasler about the fact that
most ISP's will say "sorry no-do-linux" and that's it.  I myself was
connected with one of the big ISP's here in Oz, and well, they decided
that not supporting linux was going to be a big thing for them.  You
obviously run an ISP, so... how's this one, would you answer this
question if it was asked of you?

"When I'm connecting to the server my ppp connection requires the
remote-ip address.  What is the remote IP address for your system for
dial-up accounts?"

They decided that they could not provide me with that information...
How's a guy supposed to connect ANYTHING other than win95/98 to their
system?

BTW - It was dynamic IP addressing, with the remote end not providing it's
IP address for the connection, so pppd would not work properly...

regards,
	Peter Ludwig