Perhaps he couldn’t make it to the Paralympic Games this year to mock the athletes…

While deploying a new Debian 5.0 virtual server at Rackspace (excellent company), I ran into a problem installing the GPL version of Virtualmin.

Having not seen this issue before, I “live chatted” with Rackspace support, who rightly informed me to contact the vendor. So I posted on the virtualmin forum, and then I posted on the site serverfault.com

Here is what I posted: (the 17 second video of the installation failure and all the error messages is linked below)

http://serverfault.com/questions/119900/virtualmin-install-failing-on-rackspace-debian-5-0/120177#120177

Here is a link to the video file I linked to : 2010-03-06_1316 (removed from the screen shot only to prevent my bandwidth cap on my free Screencast.com account from being exceeded)

At any rate, this wasn’t my first run through of the installation, so I decided to call it quits and see what solutions the ServerFault.com community could offer.

The next day…

I suppose I should have been excited that a real Virtualmin employee answered the question – except that he told me I was mentally ill:

The video isn’t working for me. Besides that, it’s insane to post a video of a terminal session. I mean, like, clinically. You need medical attention immediately. Some sort of anti-psychotic drug or something.

Here is his “answer” to my question:

http://serverfault.com/questions/119900/virtualmin-install-failing-on-rackspace-debian-5-0/120177#120177

Ok – so he seems to be telling me that a video of the failure isn’t the best possible way to have transmitted the information. I think

“Please paste the log file” would have sufficed, don’t you?

I have a cousin with schizophrenia. She takes anti-psychotic medication. I’m sure she, her psychiatrist and the Canadian Mental Health Association would be thrilled to know this serious medical condition is being used as an insult by a Virtualmin employee.

Here is an entry from the Serverfault.com FAQ:

Be nice.

Treat others with the same respect you’d want them to treat you. We’re all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.

I guess the last sentence of that entry needs to be more specific:

Bring your sense of humor, unless your humor includes mocking someone with a disability, thereby perpetuating the stigma of mental illness.

And here is the man himself: Perl scripter, part time psychiatrist, and all around meanie:

http://serverfault.com/users/3887/swelljoe

My advice if you’re contemplating a web-based control panel for your server or website:  Either get it working without asking any questions, or risk public humiliation at the hands of their forum trolls.