We are a moderately large ADSM installation, 3 servers, 3000 clients,
32G of database space.

Last January, one of our servers began crashing three times each evening,
apparently as the result of a corrupted database.  I opened an incident,
but got no callback until I called again and insisted that somebody call
me.  The person who finally called had me send log files covering a
couple of evenings.  Since then, I've heard nothing at all from them.

The server continued to crash three times every evening, so many of
the backups were not completing.  That led me ultimately to raise the
severity of my incident to 1, because the server was essentially
unusable.

Finally, in March, I figured out which client must be setting off the
abends and moved it to a different server.  That stopped the crashes,
but nobody from IBM knows that, because the last time they contacted
me was before then.

And, of course, this is hardly a fix for the problem, because I'm left
with a server that seems to have a corrupted database.  I don't dare do
anything to it, such as move to a new version or delete the bad client's
files, for fear of making things worse.  And I certainly don't know that
I'd be able to restore that database from a current backup if I should
need to.

I really need to be able to use that server for that particular client,
because it is the only one of the servers that has a tape robot that is
in a different building from the client.  In other words, I am no longer
getting nightly offsite backups of that client (a large and important
Novell server).

I keep calling the Support Center and asking for a callback, but nobody
ever calls me back.  I have to assume that they aren't working on the
problem, since they've never asked for a dump (I have *lots* of dumps).

A few months ago, when the SHARE ADSM rep asked me to prepare an ADSM
talk for SHARE next month, I suggested that that would be unwise from
their point of view, as I would have no choice but to talk about their
complete lack of support on this problem.  She said the support manager
would get in touch with me, but he/she has not yet done so.

When I called the Support Center again last week to ask again for a
callback, I was told that although my incident was a Severity 1, its
priority was 3.  If a server that crashes three times every evening is
a priority 3, what is a priority 1?  If anybody ever calls me back, I'll
ask about that.

I have been supporting IBM software for almost 30 years, and I've never
had an experience like this.  Indeed, this is orders of magnitude worse
than the worst experiences I've ever had with any other IBM product.

I apologize for airing dirty laundry in public, but I have long since
exhausted all of the normal means for communicating with ADSM "Support",
so I thought I'd give this a try.

Melinda Varian,
Office of Computing and Information Technology,
Princeton University