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Webserver support trouble

Started by Sander Jul 5, 2004 at 3:35 AM 4 replies 500+ views

Original Post

Jul 5, 2004 at 3:35 AM

I work for a logistics company of the Heineken brewery in Holland. Quite a cool job as I spend most of my time programming a PHP/MySQL driven intranet website. Recently, we got a new webserver especially for this purpose. Well, not new though. We gave our computer support company an old desktop machine and asked them to install a new OS, Apache, PHP, MySQL, etcetera. Pretty much a standard setup. When it came back a week later, it all worked smoothly and I was thrilled by it! Then came the bill... The support company is charging us with 20 hours of extra work to install the server's software. That's 20 hours times 90 euro's an hour, that's 1.800,- euro's! (excluding VAT). Needless to say, I feel slightly ripped off but I have no way to prove this. I know sh*t about *nix and installing stuff on it. So here's my question: Could you give an estimate on how much time it would take a pro (the support company claims to be pro's) to take a slightly aged desktop and install the following:

A *nix variant (They chose FreeBSD 5.2.1. I have no clue as to why or the diferences between all the *nix variants. They said OpenBSD wasn't good enough).
Apache 1.3.x with the mod_dav module
PHP 4.3.7 with the GD library (GD comes bundled with PHP).
MySQL (They chose 4.0.20)
Some form of sendmail. I suppose this comes with the OS. I didn't care what they did, as long as the PHP mail() command worked.

Thank you sooo much if you can help out. I do understand that installing webserver software costs money, but I feel that for 1800 euro's I could have gotten a much better deal elsewhere.

Michael Tanczos

Jul 5, 2004 at 4:06 AM

A few hours.. maybe 5-6. Even for a pro I would doubt they have everything memorized unless they do it on a very consistent basis.

Quite honestly, pretty much everything you listed is an out-of-box install with the exception of one apache module. The software installation should have went pretty quick. The setup would have taken longer, but there isn't all that much to set up. For email I would have opted for qmail over sendmail.

For 1800 euros.. I think you got ripped off unless they did some real elaborate security lockdowns, custom tools they set up for you, etc.

But that's just my opinion.

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Michael Tanczos

aftermath

Jul 5, 2004 at 4:06 AM

I like your job, I have somthing simmular.

I'd say around 2 hours for "pro" installers.

Michael Tanczos

Jul 5, 2004 at 4:20 AM

Quote:
Original post by aftermath
I like your job, I have somthing simmular.

I'd say around 2 hours for "pro" installers.

Hehe.. I was going to say 2 as well but for his purpose I think he would need a more conservative estimate. =P

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Michael Tanczos

Sander

Jul 5, 2004 at 6:02 AM

Thanks for your comments. I guess I was right about 20 hours being far too much. Our SysAdmin has demanded a specification of these hours to see what they try to claim. We have little intention of paying though. I mean, these 20 hours came on top of the 3 hours (180 euro's) they already charged for the all-in-a-box package. I have also confirmed that they installed the GENERIC 5.2.1 FreeBSD so there's also no compile time that they could charge us for.

I have been told though that the packaging manager can matter when you are installing things. Does anyone know how I can check what packaging manager they use or have used?

cyanide

Jul 5, 2004 at 2:36 PM

Like Michael said most of these can be installed with the OS, I mean unless the team didn't know these were have to installed from the begininning.

Not sure how to determine the packaging manager. But apart from the OS, even if these apps were installed from the source tarballs (i guess thats the slowest?) it shouldn't take more than 20 mins to install each of them. MySQL always is installed in the binary so that's hardly the time spent downloading and extracting it (5 minutes max). So unless they spent like 15 hours in fine tuning your apps it really doesn't figure...

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