Re: Issues with commercial installations and advocacy [was ---> Re: Interesting notice in REC Calicut

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <r.suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Indranil Das Gupta saw fit to inform LI that: 

>their end-product/solution/setup. At one of the last couple of places it was absolute No-No to Win NT and at the other
>it was a question between Solaris on a SparcServer 5 or Linux on a Dual Xeon.

Linux has become, shall we say, fashionable - for all the wrong reasons,
if what you say is true.  [It ~is~ true - I've seen it happen myself]

>have any problem...right?" or have the average "skill-level" of the people who did a course at any PTI (private
>training institutes...read NIIT/Aptech).
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Don't let me get started on this - you've got hold of one of my pet
peeves :)

>/home/httpd and argue that SRM.CONF has been misconfigured by us!!!!! ;) When we try to explain this over mail, a
>certain of lack of basic understanding of techie english come into play from the client's part, resulting in problems
>with communication.  

... and I set up a server for a client, and am asked to run over there
every few days for something or the other.  In one ~really~ horrendous
case, the moron who called himself a sysadmin there (basically an e-mail
checker and word / excel typist) got a copy of unix for dummies, logged
into the server and STARTED PRACTICING !!!!

Needless to say - he eventually got around to doing 

~/public_html> rm -rf *

:(  $%$^$#^#%^#%@^

The next day, I get a frantic mail saying "Hai.  Ur server is not
working.  Pleas rectify ASAP".  Phew, luckily I had a backup of their site
handy and could restore it after a while (marathon ftp upload,
reconfigure cgi scripts ........) :(

>What do you (anyone for that matter) do in such case??  Don't deal with clients like these...? Apart from the money
>aspect, the idea of one more server installation sometimes acts as a stronger incentive/bait (referring to the advocacy
>angle) to take on the job.

Don't give them passwords - contract to maintain the server yourself.

>> However, we all know that techies don't necessarily qualify as presenters,
>> and maybe *that's* the issue.

That ~can~ be remedied.

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian + President, CAUCE India + www.india.cauce.org
Stopping Spam In India + suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx + Spammers are Losers
--
Algol-60 surely must be regarded as the most important programming language
yet developed.
		-- T. Cheatham