[Sysadmin] Debian "unsupported by The Planet"

[David Kaufman]

Lovely news:

Here's the ticket you've all been getting useless email notices about 
today, regarding the new server (that I'm now beginning to wish I'd never 
ordered):

https://orbit.theplanet.com/nav_support/ticket_view.html?ticket_id=5196436

Pasted here, for those of you who haven't or (can't | (don't (feel 
like|want to|know how to)) log in to read on the planet's support ticketing 
behemoth:


========================================================================
David Kaufman - Tuesday October 14th, 2008; 11:05 AM CDT
This is a request to reload the Operating System on my server. The request 
details are as follows:

Hardware Name : evoltorg (Server)
Location info : Tile : BB11 (Tile)

Operating System: CentOS Enterprise Linux - 4.x - 32 bit

Comments:

I would like the latest stable Debian O/S (version 4.0r4, aka "etch") 
installed on this server. (A slightly older 4.0x revision etch install 
would be fine too, if that's what you have -- we'll update it ourselves).

Feel free to wipe the drive completely -- there is nothing on this machine 
currently that we want or need.

Please partition the drive with:

1. a 500 MB swap partition,
2. a 100 MB ext3 /boot partition,
3. the rest ext3 mounted on /

If possible I'd also like to request a waiver of the $25 O/S reload fee, as 
this is a brand new server I just ordered today, that has never been used. 
Support advised me the fee was normally waived for new servers.

Thanks!

-dave


Jason R. - Tuesday October 14th, 2008; 11:12 AM CDT
Please stand by while we verify the OS reload charges.


Jason R. - Tuesday October 14th, 2008; 12:11 PM CDT
I have confirmed with my supervisor that for us to install Debian "eth" 
there will be a $150 manual install fee and the OS would also be 
unsupported by The Planet. All custom OS install will require a the manual 
install fee. Please let us know how you would like to proceed. Thank you.


David Kaufman - Tuesday October 14th, 2008; 6:00 PM CDT
When I spoke to your tech support department this morning on the phone, I 
was told that Debian *was* a supported operating system.

Our system administrators are asking me: Debian is no longer supported at 
ThePlanet? Since when?

Evolt.org is a non-profit organization of web professionals, and we ordered 
this new server to (eventually) replace our other dedicated server (*not* 
the one related to this ticket) which has been running Debian at ThePlanet 
for almost five years. When we moved our site to your service (it was 
ServerMatrix, back then) Debian came pre-installed on it, and your support 
for Debian was one of the main factors in our decision to choose to host 
here.

Does this mean that the Debian 3 (sarge) operating system on our current, 
main, production server is also "unsupported by The Planet"?

Fortunately, several of our members are system administrators and we have 
never needed, nor asked for, any support in maintaining our server, its 
software, or O/S, but it is a bit alarming to hear that, should we have 
needed any support, you no longer offer it, especially since "Debian 
stable" was a O/S option in the configuration drop-down when I ordered the 
machine, and our sysadmins all highly recommended it.

Now they are also highly recommending Ubuntu Hardy LTS. Is that a supported 
O/S?


Jordan H. - Tuesday October 14th, 2008; 6:19 PM CDT
Debian has not been supported as a new install for a couple of years. We 
still honor support requests for basic support on all legacy debian 
servers. However, new orders do not have have debian support. We can 
install it as a custom OS, but it will incur a $150 charge to install and 
for all future OS reloads. Support will also be very limited to power and 
networking.

The operating systems we currently support are:
RHEL 4&5
CentOS 4&5
FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.0
Windows 2003 & 2008

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Jordan Harder
Supervisor, Data Center Operations

========================================================================

Ugh,

Anyone know how to (or if it's even possible to) install Debian over CentOS 
...remotely?

I'm sure its *possible*, perhaps with ISO files instead of a physical 
CD/DVD in the drive, even fun, but only if it works, of course...

This is a tantalizingly interesting post on their forums about how one guy 
avoids the need to pay for the data center's "remote hands and eyes" 
services, during his debian kernel upgrades:
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=79060#entry512926

If not, and I can't talk them out of this ridiculous $150 manual O/S 
install fee, I'm gonna cancel this whole debacle and hope to god I can get 
a refund.

-dave