In regard to: Re: [Networker] Stealing from Peter to feed Paul?, Stan...:
On Jun 14, 2006, at 3:48 PM ? 6/14/06, Sackson [US], Mark A. wrote:
When I call EMC for support, almost 10 times out of 10 it is a WEBEX
session. I like the idea of the WEBEX session because it solves the
problem a lot faster.
I try to answer questions when I can, but I do not steal from Peter to
feed Paul.
I find this listsrv VERY VALUABLE to post questions and get responses
from people who are having the same problems I might be experiencing.
Speaking as the maintainer of this list, I thank you for the kind words.
The practice of people calling EMC tech support on behalf of other
subscribers who lack an EMC tech support agreement is news to me. No one
from EMC has contacted me about that issue. I am not doubting that such
things happen though. Such a practice strikes me as unethical and I hope
that it stops now on the basis of this conversation.
That's news to me too, and it's hard for me to understand why someone
would be motivated to do that. At the same time, though, if I ever sense
EMC trying to stifle open discussion of their product, including the
free sharing of bits of information one has previously received from support,
that's the very moment that our site will start looking at other products.
Here's a (long) example of why I feel that way. In January of 2005,
after upgrading our server from 6.1.4 to 7.1.3 (6.1.4 went end-of-support
January 22nd, 2005), we discovered that we couldn't reliably recover
*any* data on our NetWare clients. We opened a support call right away,
and spent a few days with Legato tech support debugging the problem and
trying to reproduce it in their labs. They couldn't reproduce it.
As an aside, that was the first time they used webex to debug a problem
with us. Note to EMC: when you're going to use webex and the person on
the other end is signed on as administrator, don't just take over and
start typing commands. Give the admin advance warning of what you're
doing and why. Our NetWare admins were pretty worked up after that
incident. But I digress.
After about a week and not much progress with support, I posted a question
to this list, basically asking, "anyone seen this?". Here's the link
to the archive:
https://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501&L=NETWORKER&P=R24401&I=-3&X=69A3B450CD47672BEC&Y=mooney%40dogbert.cc.ndsu.nodak.edu
I got a response off-list within hours from a gentleman in Europe that's
a long-time subscriber but infrequent poster. He communicated that they
too were seeing the same issue, and had been working with Legato for a
couple weeks. He and I communicated for a few days about the (lack of)
progress we were individually making. After a couple weeks of this, I
asked him for his Legato case number, which he kindly shared with me.
My call was eventually escalated and I ended up on a support call with
the front-line tech support person I had been working with and a
development lead. On that call, both the development lead and the front
line tech support person told me that no one else had reported any problem
similar to my case. They were (and had been) therefore proceeding on the
belief that it was some kind of media database corruption on our server.
I countered with the case number I had received from my friend in Europe.
I could briefly hear typing on the other end(s) of the line, and then a
lot of silence, punctuated by the occassional keypress or mouse click.
After about 30 seconds of silence, the development lead came on and
thanked me for sharing that information, because it gave them much more
info to go on, and it gave them information about another developer that
was looking into the problem.
After that call, they isolated the problem and had a hot-fix in about
10 days. During that period, the support people my European collaborator
was dealing with gave him much different timelines regarding when a fix
would be available for his server platform than the timetable I had
received from Legato. I shared the info I had, he "pushed back" on
Legato support using that info, and they got him fixes earlier than he
had originally been promised.
As a fun postscript to this example, the problem we were seeing was
caused by a fix (for saveset recovers under NetWare) that Legato had
incorporated into 7.1.3. The fix completely broke continuation savesets,
so any saveset > 2 GB couldn't be recovered. Legato couldn't reproduce
it in their labs because they never tried a saveset "that big".
Apparently their SQA group never tried recovers of savesets that big
before 7.1.3 was released. I did share that information, multiple times,
on this very mailing list, in answer to questions that people posted when
they later ran into the same problem.
So, while I would never open a support call to try and solve some other
customer's problem, I expect to be able to share information I already
have to help out some other customer, even when part or much
of that information came from support.
Tim
--
Tim Mooney mooney AT dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak DOT edu
Information Technology Services (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
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