Discussion on:

Linksys just lost a customer.

when you call the Linksys Help Desk, the first person you talk to is someone who reads from a piece of paper.

This isn't new for anyone who's ever had to deal with help desk support at any company big enough to have a help desk.

Help Desks will always be terrible. It would cost to much to provide technically knowledgeable people who could actually solve the problem.

Really, I wouldn't be shocked if this revalation were actually true, considering the call center staff are just a bunch of retrained monkeys (former telemarketers) taught to read from a sheet of paper. I'll never forget how I called Verizon because my DSL modem wasn't syncing up to the local Telco POP (they had an outage) and the first thing the idiot technician told me was to reboot my PC. I told the moron that rebooting my DSL modem had no affect on the modem not syncing up with the DSLAM at the telco. All I wanted to know was if there was an issue at the Telco and how long it would take to resolve, but the technician proceed to waste my time by inundating me with half-assed questions he read off a sheet. When I asked to be transferred to a regional manager to escalate the call, the scumbag tech hung up on me, knowing I would point out what a dumbass he was.

There are many factors that could contribute to your remarks about the "trained monkeys" at a support call center. You may not want to hear them, but in case someone else does, I will mention just a few factors that can affect the quality of the customer service anyone might receive when they call for support on any product or service.

1) What's the "native language" of the support person on the line with you? Given the out-of-country outsourcing that is going on today, someone trying to give customer support in a language different from their own has at least "2.x" strikes against them from the get-go.

I am agreeing with you here. As much as the companies paying for the out-of-USA support DON'T want to admit it, training someone to give technical support in a language other than their own is, at best, a poor-to-impossible thing for the person needing the support to want to have to deal with. It is done solely to let the providing product's company to give "support" at pennies on the dollar to what they would have to pay to native-language speaking people to do the same job. The line of reasoning is "why pay someone in the US $500 per week (or more) to do a job that we can outsource for $25 a week to [fill in the blank with country of choice]?

2) The script a call center employee is using is, in many cases, a REQUIRED process method that the employer insists that the employee follow very closely, if not to the letter, in most if not all troubleshooting calls. After certain required steps are taken, then the expertise of the call center employee does come into play.

I agree 100% that not all call center employees are equally sharp, or even interested, in the work they're doing. In many cases it's just a job like any other job one does to pay the bills. And to KEEP that job, you have to follow the requirements your employer sets forth, like it or else.

3) CSRs take your call "cold", having no idea how much YOU know about the subject you're calling about. Of course they're going to start out with KISS troubleshooting techniques, because more than a few people calling in forget to do stupid things prior to placing the call...the old "did you check the cords are all plugged in?" routine.

BTW, rebooting your equipment -- some, if not all of it depending on the circumstances -- is a valid method of having something "re-sync" or "re-initialize" itself if the settings it's trying to run off of are outdated or invalid for some reason. But I'm sure you knew that...

4) In some cases, the CSR may not have been informed (yet) of the exact nature of an ongoing problem that has just occurred in a given area. The powers-that-be don't always disseminate everything to the employees in ongoing "every 5 minutes" updates. In other words, the guy on the phone with you _IS NOT ALWAYS TOLD WHEN A PROBLEM IS EXPECTED TO BE CORRECTED_. It's not his fault if his supervisors either don't inform him, or have the info TO inform him, every few minutes as to the status of one local area out of the hundreds that call center may service.

5) Put the shoe on the other foot, bub. How would you like to have to deal with arrogant, self-righteous idiots call after call after call and never show any frustration or emotion, other than to attempt to show empathy, no matter how badly behaved the person on the other end of the phone was behaving? Having to deal with the "Ugly American" attitude, whether it's in person or over the phone, is a real, royal pain in the ASS for the person who has to take the crap that's dealt out no matter how rudely or ignorantly it's spewed at them.

Did the guy hang up on you? I have no way of knowing. But I _do_ know that calls get dropped by accident when trying to conference or transfer them. Or are you admitting that you behaved so badly that you EXPECTED to get hung up on?

6) Escalating a situation to the CSRs immediate supervisor is a valid option; however, carrying on and demanding to be immediately connected to [pick one: Regional Manager, Vice President, CEO of company, etc.] is an invalid option in most cases. Like it or not, the next step *is* the immediate supervisor. You can keep walking up the links in the chain of command as far as you want to go, but *don't* expect the lowliest peon on the telephone who happened to get your call to have access to the upper level "powers that be". They may have a mailing address to give you or a headquarters phone number, but usually that's about it. You have to move on to the higher venue in steps, not one giant leap.

7) Like anything else you run across, never forget that treating people how you expect to be treated yourself is the best way to handle a situation. Flying off the handle may make you think you're impressing someone, and you're right -- you're impressing upon them that you are unable to calmly asses a problem and approach it in a reasonable manner to obtain the solution you desire.

After I get my call number, the first thing I tend to say is "escalate"

If the first level of any support could have helped, I would have solved it myself long before I had called...

I have not been helped by 1st level support anywhere except for Emulex... (Their product works so well that engineers actually are doing off hours UNIX support.)

Unless the documentaion is bad, or deliberately wrong(MS by practice in the 1990's or the product is broken) It is usally easily fixable by a call to somebody who speaks my mother tongue of UNIX.

The language of a person is not as important as their knowledge...

This is just typical of Linksys support. I've called them a few times over different issues for different equipment.

The RV042, being one of my favorite devices of theirs, is unfortunately also the least understood by tech support. In two cases I called them about this device once about how to purchase the license upgrade to the QuickVPN client. I spent 2 days and over 3 hours bouncing between tech support, sales support, and customer service because NOBODY had any idea how to sell the license to me. I actually still have a copy of one of the most inane and worthless tech support emails ever. It has at least 5 elements that are near pee-your-pants hilarious because of their ineptitude. I seriousl question whether the woman who sent it wasn't under the influence of some powerful substance.

The other noteable event is when I called to find out why this device wouldn't route traffic, from another segment coming in over another router, to the internet. I sent emails and was told engineering would look at it. After 2 weeks I gave up and bought a NetScreen at 3 times the cost. The client was very understanding. I had asked one of my techs to upgrade the firmware and test the RV042 to see if that helped and he informed me it still did not route. When I went to replace the device I started recording the setting from the mail config screen and noticed a new button since the firmware update. "Add multiple subnets." I wanted to blow something up in a big way. So I got to eat the cost of a $600 NetScreen until I find another buyer. This firmware update occured between the first and second week DURING MY SUPPORT CALLS AND EMAILS TO LINKSYS. Nobody apparently was aware of the addiditon to the firmware that added this function. I can't help but think that I am the reason they added this feature. That somehow my problem made it to engineering where they went "Oh crap! We'd better fix this!" but never TOLD ME THEY DID IT. There are more stories, but yes, Linksys support for business is 0 for 10.

This is relevant and not-so-relevant. I called the cable company to have some late charges dropped, since the payments and the bill had crossed each other in the mail.
The rep immediately started making comments, such as 'Why would I do that?', and 'that does not fit our business model'.
After I felt like I had exhausted her script, I hung up, called again, and, got an intelligent person on the line, and have the issue resolved.

Also, I would like to add that the Help Desk person probably did not know who CNET is.

I have recently had similar problems with Belkin's help desk. First I talk to the script reader. Then I get hung up on at least twice. Then I get another script reader. Finally get to level 2 who schedules an appointment with level 3. The only problem - they do not know what EST means.

I got the call back unfortunately it was six hours early and I was in a meeting. Who would think that I could possible have a job as well.

It is help desk support in general. It is frustrating as a service provider, a former help desk representative, and a person who values a good customer satisfaction experience to see that most of the help desk experiences I have any more are negative.

And try to get a responsible manager to call you back. That never happens any more. There is just a lack of responsibility and accountability. The people we get to talk to do not care about our problems. They get paid to read a sheet of paper and do not need to know the products that they support.

It is a growing problem that does not seem to get much attention from executive management. A little training would go a long way to customer satisfaction.

Oh, for it to be the early 80's again! (Support-wise, that is.) The old "Mom and Pop" ISPs were the best with support. In the majority of cases, the person answering the phone would be the same guy that actually built their system and installed the modem pool. After just a few sentences they could size up your tech skills enough for them to get straight to the issue and get it resolved without rehashing all the basics you've already gone through. If they wer having a problem of some sort, most were even honest enough to admit it, and could I please just give them a few minutes to finish up. One even asked if I could help him test his fix, which I was happy to do.

Unfortunately, most of those guys either went out of business or sold out to a larger ISP...economies of scale at work. Basically, he thing I've noticed over the years, is the bigger the company, the worse the support gets.

Now, when you get a really good support tech on the phone, enjoy it, it won't be long before they either get promoted or move on to greener (better paying) pastures on their own.

I am so tired of getting a tech on the phone that can't speak english. And then hear that same company tell how they are all american. I have no problem if I have a customer that has a hard time with english. I just slow down and we get through it. But when I am trying to get help and the help desk person gets mad at me because he/she can't communicate, that really gets me.

I'm with you on this one...The language barrier is a real problem. You're always being put on hold, for the "while I Research this" syndrome. I always wondered...Are they really researching something or did they take a break to water thier Camel or Elephant. Every once in a while you'll get someone Stateside and, what a pleasure that is. To combat this, I've had to read many books, and use a lot of "trial & error". I have self-taught myself to the point that I might call tech-support once a yr, or maybe less.

The only thing that i can tell you from my own expirience is that some firms are taking foreign call centers to work for them because they're much cheaper than local..And you can't expect from somebody who's in India for example to talk perfect english

If a company is making it's share of English speaking customers money then it should expect to have to provide English speaking techs.

It is not the speaking English that is the problem, it is getting them to understnd what you are saying.

Well..I can just tell from my own expirience what happens in Serbia..As you probably don't have a clue what's going on here I'll tell what's it like when you call Tech support..One day I had a REALLY urgent thing to finish from home but my internet connection was dead..I'm using ADSL and I really need my internet connection to work.I tryed to figure out is it maybe something in my computer but i checked everything and i saw that everything's allright. I called help desk and I've got the obvious idiot on the telephone.She was telling me to restart my computer and everything's gonna be allright.After some 10 minutes of argueing with her, I finnaly got an answer from their IT manager who told me what...surprise!! RESTART!
I have to tell you something about this work..I work in Help desk and this job most of the time sux..It's very hard to work with people, but I'm always on the run for some new informations and ways to help our customers.All that i can say is that I'm the only one here who browses internet forums and look form some answers..In the other occasion when i called my provider's internet support I've got the same girl and i finnaly told her to change a job because she sux as tech support.You can also do that.It's your right as a customer who pays her salary

I've worked help desk and call center intermittently over
the past 25 years. I'm also a former reference librarian. In
grad school, the best thing a librarian ever told me, as
well as my classmates, is if you don't know the answer,
find someone who does. Many are the times at my last
call center gig i nearly got fired for excessive talk time, as
I was research the customer's issue on the fly. I also
made recommendations for third party services that were
well outside my scope of support (rather than tell the
customer not my problem and hang up, especially when it
was in a field of my expertise (namely music, as I also
hold a degree in muisc history and have worked in a
campus radio station as an undergrad).

In short, spend as little time and money, on a customer as
possible. That's why MOST call centers are script readers.
Those employees that can think for themselves are the
ones that cost the call center money by actually helping
the customer. They are the ones that must be terminated
at all costs.

I had my own disheartening experience with Linksys support.

I bought a PSUS4 print server/switch and tried to set my wife's iMac up to print to it. Seemed pretty straightforward, but no matter what I did, it wouldn't print. It would spit out pages, but wouldn't actually print.

I used the Linksys website to chat with support and was very quickly informed that they do not support OS-X.

I can understand not supporting linux a lot better than I can not supporting OS-X. Linux users tend to be more knowledgable and need less help making things work than other computer users, though some assistance when it's needed would be nice. But to completely ignore any OS other than the one that has market dominance is just shameful.

I finally figured out that the iMac just didn't want to print when the ink cartridges were low, even though my Windows machine still printed fine.

I do continue to use Linksys products, because I know that they are good quality products. I just know now not to expect any help from them if I have problems.

I use to have a little wired linksys router at home. The default "firewall" on it was full of holes, so my software firewall was always catching access attempts/scans. Every now and then one would actually warrent investigation, but, if i tried to ping or traceroute THROUGH the router, it would drop my connection to my ISP for a few seconds. I could understand blocking icmp, but to disconect on a local user initiated icmp....Anyway, I upgraded the firmware to the latest version, and the firewall, for what it is, began to work to my satisfaction. But, I could still not ping through the router. Tech help walked me through upgrading the firmware, again, and of course, it didnt help. They then pretty much said, "We have no idea, sucks to be you." About two days latter I ordered a cisco 870, havent looked back since. I will probalby never buy another linksys router. I have used several linksys wireless AP and several home switches that seem to perfor well and issue free. But the long list of "issues" they seem to have with routers leaves me feeling a little hesitant.

My experience with Linksys Tech Support is that they are generally incompetent regardless of the operating system you are using. I have yet to call Linksys or chat with a tech online and not become completely frustrated with their ass backward process of determining the source or resolution of your issue(s).

A few years ago I purchased a Linksys 4 port10/100 switch with (supposedly bi-directional) parallel port print server. This was before Cisco acquired it.

Even though it was supposed to work with all current flavors of Windows (98, ME, 2000) it simply would not work unless I configured it as a Netware client. Even then it would print a single page & hang. I tried it with 2 different models of Epson, one model of Citizen & 1 model of Canon printer. All these printers worked flawlessly when connected directly to the local parallel port. No amount of communication with the help desk could sort out the problem.

Now it is just gathering dust in my pile of junk.

No matter what kind of bargain I may get on Linksys product I decided - NEVER AGAIN!

I also continue to use LinkSys products, but after a couple of experiences with their helpdesk, I will probably never call them again.

They are geared toward helping only the basic level user. I pretty much had already done all the basic troubleshooting steps and they couldn't figure out what to do except say, "Buy another router."

Yep. "LinkSys: Good products, USELESS tech support." It could be their next ad.

Based on the assumption that writting for CNet means you have some technical knowledge; why not support the router yourself?

It sounds like your having the same grief any gamer gets with a router. Find out what ports are used to ping/tracert and forward the router's external ports to your internal machine. When the ping comes back, it's hitting your router and not being forwarded to your workstation. That's my guess based on minimal information. If that doesn't help though, we both have some learning to do.

Helpdesk is always usless for questions beyond "I just baught your new product and I can barely turn on a computer myself, how do I make it work?"

In my case, Linksys seems to have no newer firmware updates for my wrt54gs. With the router being older than a year, I've gleefully voided the warrenty by adding a real OS to my router instead of the minimalist garbadge that Linksys calls firmware. Now I can do what the hardware is capable of instead of what Linksys thinks I might want to do with it.

I'll have to try some external tarceroutes with the new firmware though I've never had an issue tracing websites in the past.

My grief with Linksys/Cisco is that the wr?54gs pcmcia NIC doesn't have native Linux drivers. If you want to write about something on CNet; how bout asking the vendor why they won't provide Linux drivers or at minimum, specs so that support can be written into the kernel. Running my NIC wrapped in ndiswrapper is getting real old.

I ran the gamut of options in my router. It just simply won't let those packets out. Unfortunately, the router I have (BEFSR41 V3 with the latest - which is a joke in and of itself - firmware update) doesn't have the biggest set of configuration options. It's pretty basic.

Turns out there is a traceroute issue with that router. There are firmware hacks that allow it to work but they won't work with mine (for some odd reason). Even updating to the latest firmware from Linksys doesn't do the trick.

I'm tempted to put linux on this router. Either that or just slap a hub on my test machine and use it to route. Probably work better anyway.

I'm running OpenWRT with the newer Xwrt interface on my 54gs now and it's been almost as much fun as the initial honeymoon with VMware server once I finally installed it too look at.

If your going to void your warrenty I'd recommend White Russian with the newer X-wrt interface.

http://x-wrt.org/
images should be a subfolder off FTP Site #1

openwrt.org is the original distro source however, it's images have the older X-wrt interface.

I suspect you already know this but for the 2% chance that it's not somehow come up in conversation with the CNet crowd, there it is.

supporter of smoothwall, and devil linux for firewll applications. I have a smoothwall box sitting and waiting for those times I want to play with cisco configs on my 870 without loosing internet access for research. if you dont mind paying a little money, the Astaro linux firewall is easy to set up, manage, and quite functional. I have herd good things about IPCop and vyatta, which I have intentions of learning soon.

I've had similar experiences with Netgear products. Called tech support to try to configure a VPN and the person I reached was not familiar with either the product which I had bought or the English language. The latter was the most lamentable, since I verbally impregnated his entire family and burned down his village. He missed a good show.

I've had a m0n0wall up and running for the last year and a half and couldn't be happier. Tons of throughput using a cast-off Celeron 900 MHz box with 128 MB of ram and a 10 gig hard drive. Do yourself a favor and set one up with Intel NIC's and you'll never go back to sorry little SOHO routers again.

.
This does not turn me off of Linksys at all. I find the state of technical support for ALL hardware and software vendors to be completely unacceptable. It doesn't matter who the vendor is. And, I have thought this way even before many of them offshored the function to India. It's even worse now, but the people in India try a lot harder to help.

I contact a hardware or software vendor for tech support as the very last resort. Whenever I do contact them, I nearly always find that the person who is trying to help me knows less about it than I do.

The only problems I ever have are difficult ones (the simple ones gets solved easily). I find that using Google to find solutions as the most effective way. There is often someone else who has posted the same problem and a truly knowledgeable person who has provided the answer.

So, I would not dump Linksys over this if I were you.

i get that tech support sucks. it always has. i've only had a few experiences where TS was good.

my real problem is a company actually having the gall to say "we don't support this operating system". when we all know that means "we don't want to spend the time training more monkeys or writing out scripts for another operating system." it's lame and, in my opinion, unacceptable.

of course, being a Linux zealot doesn't help my situation much. well - actually it does because i can always turn to my OS to solve the problem. but again that defeats the purpose of my rant. Linksys shouldn't be in the business of saying "we don't support this OS". they should be in the business of making sure their products work. and that means working in multiple environments.

I did not reed all the comments but I have to agree in one way or another whit all of you on these facts
? Vender and provider don?t hire knowledge people because it is costly for them. So when you call a vender ore a provider you cannot expect the agent to go beyond the basics unless you are paying for that call.
? If you are at this web page, you know more than most of the tech support agents out there.
? Google 99.999% of the time finds you a answer
Here is what no is contemplating, about 60% of the people that call, do not know what OS they have, they don?t know if they have a firewall, they have never hear of Firefox, and few can?t find the address bar, I have taken calls where the customer?s home page was change, and they and as per them they cannot surf.
And that?s the real problem. Companies find it hard to pay good money to explain a customer where the address bar is, this will continue until people learn how to use a PC and stop calling because there home page has change.
Now we have tier 2 agents, and I know for a fact that Linksys has a tier 2 queue, the problems is that you can only be transferred over to one. Unless the tier 1 has done some basic trouble shutting and can no longer handle the call.
In our case we give limited support to Linux, so if you know how to open you web browser I can help you, if you don?t I am sorry.
Most agent will tell you that they don?t support it because (at least in my case) every time I help a customer whit a OS that is not Win XP, vista, or a MAC OS (this is normally a win 98 or ME) I end up spending a hour resolving all kinds of problems whit that OS. Any way I am shore that Linksys has a similar policy. It is likely that the agent did not know anything about LINUX and did not trust you when you told him that you were well acquainted with the OS.
Next time that you are told that they don?t support your OS, ask to be shown a documentation whit there scope of support.

Learn to spell! - Go to school! - Quit filling a position you have no business in! Sure and shore are NOT the same thing! Whit is not with absolutely not! All vendors of products have a MORAL responsibility to make their product run on anything a customer wants the product to run. Sure there are different O.S. specific tasks, but with the exception of VISTA all should run command line commands SIMILARLY. If a customer is running ME that is their network bugged fault. If a product fails to do a task, the product is not doing what it should. (Plain and simple) Never say not knowing about linux is a good thing - I will admit that Linux is somewhat harder to do some things, but it is FREE and FREE appeals to me and I assume it should appeal to others. I have dealt with Tech Support for Linksys and they are HORRIBLE and ignorant to boot. I asked the question "Why won't this router (WRT54G) allow for a non standard class subnet mask on the WAN side" Linksys replies "What is the subnet mask on your computer" WASTE OF TIME! Instead of hiring people with degrees and knowledge, companies hire people that will work cheap and are dumb enough not to cause them any problems (both hacking, and being a human sheep). Enough rambling - Microsoft SUX! and Billy Gates is a millionaire only because people are ignorant to what Linux has to offer and for that matter - overall ignorant about computers!

You sir, are clearly out of line in your response. It was quite evident from guilderw's response that English was not his native language. Perhaps in the future, when a post offends your sense of grammatical correctness, you'll take the time to notice the location of the respondent, in this case Costa Rica, and cut him a bit of slack instead of once again displaying American arrogance first hand.

There is no shame in admitting you were wrong. W. freely admits his errors? Man up and let us hear from you! Thanks in advance from an admirer of a quick shooter (although off target sometimes).

1. No vendor has a MORAL responsibility to support their customers' platforms. They do have one to avoid misleading or defrauding customers by stating that they support something which they do not, but if they do not support your favorite OS, there is no MORAL issue.

2. All OS's should run "command line commands" similarly? Why?

3. A lack of any knowledge is not a "good thing", but much knowledge is irrelevant. If you choose not to support Linux, why would you hire Linux experts for tech support?

4. Free should appeal to others? I'll grant that it often does, including to me, but I'd never mandate that it "should".

5. Where was Linux when Windows was taking the world over in the '90's? It wasn't even close, and in many ways is still behind.

6. Finally, I can lump roughly the second half of your rant into one suggestion: Buy a Cisco, with support. Quit complaining about the cheap (which appears to define you as well as tech support) device that you bought.

By the way, I am a Linux admin. I am not, however, an evangelist or a blind zealot.

No moral obligation at all .. and IMHO, zealots have kept Linux down ... they represent a small portion ... what OS succeeds depends on the majority many of which are scared off by ranting nuts!

But I digress,

I'm no Linux expert, no CCIE but I'e been working in this business for some time have some sort of "jr" cert in networking which leads me to question ... when did a tracert or ping command from the routers perspective become OS specific? Let me see if I can remember ... all these layers ,, 7 as I recall and those are low level commands and .. hey does the OS matter? When I read his original post my first thought was "Wonder what version of Office he's running?"

Linksys should clearly state that they will not support Linux OS's behind thier routers ... that's their right .. not a good marketing position but that would take care of it all the way around

assign static and designate "DMZ" to allow all the ARP / ICMP messages to get to the box.

with no luck.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are two
fundamentally different flavors of traceroute. The original
version uses UDP packets for the probes and uses the port
numbers to identify the ICMP error replies from the
intermediate hosts. The newer version uses ICMP echo
packets for the probes (i.e. "ping" packets), so they are
more likely to make it through firewalls and such because
pings are more likely to be allowed than UDP traffic on
high-numbered ports. Most *nix OSes and Cisco routers
use the UDP version of traceroute, but there's often an
option to use a different protocol (it's the "-P" option on
my Mac). Windows has always used the ICMP version of
traceroute (actually "tracert"). So, if you're using
traceroute to diagnose a problem from a non-Windows
machine, try using the ICMP protocol if it's available and
see if that helps.

the -I option in Linux' traceroute.

thank you so much for reminding me of that. it did work.

of course - i still hold fast to what i said in my blog.

so let's all together now say open mouth insert foot!!! and yet you still blame the help desk idiot to not know something as simple as the difference between default types of Ping packets gung ho Linux boy

The point was that the company, not the help desk person specifically, does not support a platform that has become very popular. The same company and its parent company both use this platform that their help desk does not support. That's the point.

yeah I got that point but what I'm saying is that the level one support people may or may not know the whole support situation in this case it's not that link-sys does or does not support a specific O/S because bottom line the router doesn't give crap what O/S the traffic comes from to pass or not so the point should be do we condemn a company because their low level people don't know what questions to ask or for that matter why the questions are important to the situation? I don't think so we should however hold companies to a higher standard of training in this area. I worked as a help desk tech for a while and the biggest thing we did to ensure proper help is using a real tech for the help desk in a rotation in and out of the field people who could actually fix things and agressively trained them on the things that the help desk should and should not say and what the help desk is and is not for. I think Jupiter.net has some excellent articles about the help desk and how to improve it's usefulness and why it is so important as this blog clearly shows I apologize for the earlier post don't mean to offend (I actually use sol 10 and other linux builds myself)

A $60 router a year old, give me a break - NOBODY in the enterprise market would even answer the phone unless you had an active maintenance contract. Sonicwall, Checkpoint, Cisco, none of them. The fact that you can actually even get a live body at Linksys support amazes me.

Then, top that off with the fact that 95% of all networking problems are mistakes in configuration, a simple lack of technical knowledge and/or a stupid mistake (as you found out in this case).

Sure, I've seen a couple of firmware bugs with Linksys routers, but these $60 plastic amazingly-versatile-for-the-money things actually do a decent job if you use them for what they are intended to be used for.

Linksys routers are CONSUMER LEVEL routers designed for a few home users running mainstream operating systems to share an internet connection to do simple web browsing. You put them into any situation more complex than that, and you shouldn't expect much from them or their support people. And the same goes for Netgear, DLink, Buffalo, and all the others.

If the product box says "requires Microsoft Windows", then don't expect them to talk to you about Linux.

Start developing real expectations for your sixty bucks, and you'll expend far less energy. If you want real support, go buy a $1K+ firewall with a $200/year maintenance contract.

I am not too sure about their business routers but alot of older Linksys home routers use a Linux based OS so I find the lack of Linux support even more ammusing. Most Linksys products these days now use VxWorks and I find it alot more unrealiable.

My old Linksys router used to work fine untill one day it suddenly packed in. I phoned Linksys support and said my router is dead. I knew this because I have a spare Netgear lying around and plugged it in to my cable modem and it worked fine. After going through over half an hour of "tests" eventhough the only light that ever came on was the power one, the guy who was American kindly took my address and I sent my old router back for a replacement.

Unforunatly this is when the problems really started. My new (VxWorks) one even with the latest firmware crashes quite alot and the wireless performance is terrible, since the router isn't dead they don't really want to know in the customer support department. I have had this experience with a few of the modern Linksys routers that my friends and family own. I have since ditched the Linksys router and told people to steer clear of them if possible. I now have a Belkin and apart from a few issues with the web configuration and Firefox it works fine.

I am a big supporter of free/open source/alternative software. I have put Firefox stickers on my computers and my dad's car, I almost always go to college with my Firefox t-shirt on. I even used to have a Firefox backpack. I use open office as well as lot's of other open source applications. Linux for me is still not my primary OS however. This is due to two main reasons. 1. Games either don't run well or don't run at all on Linux. 2. I can't use Linux because some of my college software runs only on Windows and there is not a Linux version avalible.

Linux has made alot of progress over the last few years. It's slowly shaking off it's geeky image and I would say now it's usable for Advanced/Expert computer users as well as Intermediate users but it is not ready for the masses yet. There is yet again two main reasons for this. 1. It's still not as easy to do some things on Linux as it is on Windows. 2. There is not enough users of Linux for some manufacturers to justify supporting it but untill more manufacturers support Linux it will put the masses off using it.

If the progress linux has made in the last few years continues though I could see within 5 years a distro that could start to get mass appeal. I see this happening for a few reasons. 1. The emerging markets. They need cheap computers and open source software as well as Linux can deliver this. 2. Venders see this emerging market and want to capitalise on it so they will start supporting Linux. 3. As the computer pricing war continues in more industrialized countries I think more computer manufacurers will turn to Linux and open source software to drive prices down even more.

Just wait a few more years and you'll be able to phone tech support lines and they will have Linux flow charts sitting in front of them as well as Windows ones!

Yours is the first honest assessment of Linux that I have read. It is just not ready for prime time, regardless of the reasons. Have a good day.

the primary reason people give for linux not ready for prime time is games. to me that just doesn't seem to be a valid reason to judge an operating system. OS X has been ready for prime time since it came out - games on OS X are few and far between. so how is it that people don't say OS X isn't ready for prime time?

outside of games, linux can do everything that windows can do.