I am currently working with two companies to resolve two completely
unrelated problems I am having with their respective software packages.
One company is fairly
small, doesn't use a case tracking system, and has only two technical
support staff. There are no forms, I can call or email them to start
the process. The other company is a
big one. They have a web interface to submit support requests. They
have a case tracking system. There are lots of support staff (they have
shifts they work).
I always enjoy calling the small company. The first thing we do is
make sure both they and I have the same understanding of the problem.
Once that is handled we get to work actually solving the problem. This
process has never once included them asking me to reboot machines
just to see if it solves the problem. It has included requests
for me to run cryptic debugging commands and provide them with the
results. Aside from the extensive debugging abilities they built into
their software, the most intelligent thing they do to make support
easier is to have a license to use Citrix's web based meeting
software to enable them to see and interact with their customer's
computers. I have dealt with them on perhaps a dozen issues with this
company, and all but one was resolved within a few days.
On the other hand, I have grown to hate asking for support from the
big company. I have opened nearly ten cases with them and have only had
two end with what I would call a good resolution. Those two were
simply reports of minor nuisances, one was already known about and fixed
by them in betas, the other was also known about, but a solution had not
yet been implemented. The other cases ended with varying degrees of
failure.
Most of the cases I resolved on my own through nearly blind trial and
error. A couple of thse wild experiments were actually guided by the
VMWare support tech monkey. Most of the time however, the tech
attempted to shift the blame to other companies. One tried to claim my
hardware was faulty (nevermind that the hardware went through the
manufacturer's diagnostics properly and what I was trying to do inside
the virtual machine worked outside of it). Another time I was asked to
verify that the problem occured on a fresh install of the OS with no
other software installed (yeah, as if the problem is likely to occur in
that state). Several of the techs asked me to reboot the host system
(which is kind of a pain as there are several virtual machines on the
host) to hopefully fix the problem.
My most recent
support request was closed by the support
tech as I couldn't provide any further information about the problem.
Now this case should have been put on hold as the problem as it happens
randomly, but when it does happen it makes the virtual machine unusuable
for some period of time (normally a dayish). If it weren't for the fact
that the yearly support license gets me free upgrades I don't
think I would renew next year.
Having decided upon m0n0wall for
our firewall, I set it up in the building machine room with a
small form factor Dell and an
Intel
Pro/1000 MT Dual Port NIC. Even before getting grief from the
campus IT group about installing a non rack mount machine into the
network rack, I knew I would need to replace it with a real rackmount
server at some point.
I created a requirements list for the server.
1 or 2U rackmount case
Sliding rack rails would be nice but are not required
4 network connections minimum, preferably 6. No more than two can
be 10/100, the rest must be gigabit.
The gigabit connections should be connected to the motherboard via
pci-x or pci express.
Preference given to Intel NIC's, however Broadcom and 3com are
likely acceptable as well.
The server should be able to boot from cdrom or floppy.
The motherboard must have pata ide on it.
The hard drive should have the cheapest drive that can be
purchased, as it will be replaced a compact flash ide adapter. (like
http://www.pcengines.ch/cflash.htm)
The motherboard and processor should be considered servergrade.
The processor should be at least 2ghz.
512megs of memory is fine. This should be in the form of one
512meg stick of ram, unless the motherboard can make use of dual channel
memory, in which case two 256 meg sticks is acceptable.
The system should cost less than $1500
Knowing that Dell
couldn't really provide what I wanted, and wanting an excuse to look
into some of the whitebox builders out there, I shopped my requirements
list around. In general I recieved quotes in just a day or two. For
every quote, I needed to follow up with a list of questions clarifying
or verifying various items on my requirements list. The contentious
issue was almost always how the gigabit ports were connected to the
processor.
One of the responses surprised me. I had asked for the specific model
number of the motherboard used so I could look up the chipsets used and
verify the bus used to connect the onboard network controllers to the cpu.
Instead of those answers, the salesman apologized and said that his
company could not provide the machine I requested. While this was the
most extreme "wrong" answer I recieved, I wasn't particularly happy with
any of the quotes I recieved. Mostly I found that salespeople don't seem
to like answering questions that are "hard". While I still have a few
months to check more possible whitebox companies, currently it looks like
I will be putting together my own machine based on a SuperMicro
bare bones system.
I sit in the hall writing this (thankfully several offices on the floor
are being remodeled and there is a comfortable chair out here). I have
been relegated to lab assistant for our mobile laptop lab.
As this is the first semester for us to be running this mobile lab
and there were still kinks to work out, it would be run almost entirely
by staff and not student lab assistants. And seeing as how I had the
best technical skills to handle difficulties, it made sense for me to be
the babysitter for the laptops.
It is halfway through the class, and I have been relegated to hall
monitor it seems. "Where is room 4208?", "How do I get to the second
floor?", "Where is the registrar's office?"
I hear the class starting to wrap up. Time to trade student ids for
laptops, packup the rest of the cart, and manhandle the damned cart back
to the storeroom.
The answers to the above questions by the way are; there is no
4208, through the double set of doors behind me and down the stairs to the
right, and Peterson Building.
A week before classes, I did a run through of setting up and using
our new mobile laptop lab. Most of the issues were related to the
logistics of setting up a projector in a classroom not designed for a
projector. There was however a problem that I had a hard time believing
was real.
One of the classes that will be using the laptops will be using them
as dumb terms to connect to a remote x server. Everything was working
as expected until we tried to run SAS.
That generated the following error in the console window;
ERROR: Floating Point Zero Divide.
ERROR: Generic critical error.
ERROR: Explorer failed to initialize.
WARNING: Protected resource may be inconsistent
WARNING: Protected resource may be inconsistent
The campus has a site license to X-Win32 which we use as the
local X server. It provides a properly setup ssh client to connect to
a remote x server. All other X windows applications (xeyes
of course being one of the more important ones tested) displayed
correctly and worked properly. It was only SAS which caused a problem.
Through a good deal of trial and error (testing different computers,
different accounts, different servers), we discover that the error only
occurs when a projector is plugged into the laptop prior to turning on
and logging into the laptop. To further add to the oddness, it is only
an issue when an "intelligent" (which is to say a modern one that does
autodetection and automatic image optimization) is used. If a video
splitter (which will strip any communication between the display device
and the laptop) is put between the laptop and the projector, SAS will
run without error.
SAS's tech support provided the following answer and suggested
solution
"We've seen this problem only with Sharp so far, but I can
tell you what is happening. The video drivers in your projectors are
corrupting the SASUSER profile catalog. It does sound far-fetched, I
know, but it's true.
Some things we've found that work are:
1. Starting the projector first, THEN invoking SAS.
2. Turning down the hardware acceleration on the projector's video card.
"
For the time being, we will be using an older projector which doesn't
cause this error to occur. Bug reports have been filed with both SAS
and Starnet, not that I expect much to come from either report as both
companies will likely blame each other.
