Managed Co-location For Debian Boxen?

Eugene Cabanopscotch writes: "I run a Web-hosting company that is seriously looking at managed co-location in the U.S. as a means to get content to overseas clients without the delays of using NZ's congested international links. I clicked through from the popular Slashdot banner ad Rackspace.com and also checked out digitalNATION and saw that they offer managed RedHat boxen. Now, not wanting to start any sort of holy flame war or anything (moderators, start your engines) I thought "that's great and all, but I want a Debian GNU/Linux box" so I quickly fired off a couple of e-mails to the listed e-mail addresses asking whether they would be willing to install and manage a Debian box. I got back flat refusals to manage Debian machines. Does anyone know of a managed co-location provider that is willing to work with Debian?" I find it odd that places will restrict co-locations to specific distributions of Linux. It's not that hard to manage a Red Hat and a Debian box, is it?

This is an old problem

[JasonChu]

Too many people fear that GNU/Linux will never be a formidable opponent to Windows (despite the fact that it is now), because they are afraid of too many forks. To that extent, people are looking for one version of Linux to be the 'True' Linux . . . this has often become Red Hat who has one of the strongest influences in the business world.

What many people don't realize, is that each distro is not really a fork of Linux, but simply different programs installed by default. The kernels vary a little; but with a couple extra programs here, an extra library there, and they are all interchangable from an admin's point of view.

Ok, so there are some idiosyncratic differences between some of the different versions of stuff included (esp. some of the stuff now included w/RH), but for the most part, they all have general similarities. Corps are just afraid of the possibility of retraining people once they have the ability to say 'Yeah, we support Linux'.

Seems almost like 'closed-source co-locating' as far as options go.

umm...

[Zurk]

if youre not managing your own boxes whats the big deal about someone else choosing a distro that they themselves will be managing and are familiar with ? it costs money to train admins - theyve been trained on redhat, they might screw up debian. linux is linux. who cares ? if you dont like it put youre own debian box up at their place and run it yourself remotely. you have an admin....right ?

http://www.ssi.net

[bgat]

I co-lo my own equipment at http://www.ssi.net, whom I picked after shopping around for several months. I even visited their site before installing my hardware, and was very pleased.

These guys have been very good to me, they know what they're doing, they've got decent bandwidth, and I think they would be happy to help you out.

Ask for Brad Niemcek.

http://www.kgns.net

[greggcz]

I am working for KGNS.net as network administrator. We do support all distributions of Linux as well as BSD. Take a look on our site if you are insterested. Gregg