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From: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: IBM AIX (*not* BSD) Software Support Procedures
Message-ID: <562@pan.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 89 07:23:38 GMT
References: <550@pan.UUCP> <6473@stiatl.UUCP> <2408@cadovax.UUCP> <175@bally.Bally.COM> <8258@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Reply-To: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Organization: Adasoft AG, Solothurn, Switzerland
Lines: 49

>	This takes time.
>	First they may have to understand the problem

Right.  So the customer gets to teach Unix to the Support "Engineer" before
he can even report the problem.  Trying to explain how to setup and use uucp
to someone who never even *heard* of uucp before is not my idea of a good time.
Pick your favorite non-trivial Unix utility and substitute it for "uucp" here.

>	The keys here 
>	are patience (I omit an explanation) and planning (don't expect a 
>	very detailed problem or question to be resolved the next day -- plan
>	in advance for what you will need to know and when you will need to
>	know it).

The real fun comes when you discover that 50 (or 100, or several hundred)
other people have also been patient, and planned what they will need to
report the *same* bug, and are now waiting for an answer from IBM.  As an
example, in recent days there have been three different people who have
written here about a problem using rlogin from non-RT systems to RT's.
I have been struggling with exactly the same problem for a long time.  I
have been patient, I have invested *huge* amounts of time trying to figure
out what is really happening so that I can report this bug.  I have had the
pleasure of teaching the Support Engineer here what rlogin is ("I only use
telnet...").  To top it off, the fact that this only happens from non-IBM
systems makes it almost hopeless to report anyway - I have already been
told several times that as long as it works between IBM systems, they are
really not interested in whether it works from any other system.

>	Some people have suggested
>	that you play games and call in "pseudo problems" with Defect Support
>	and use that route to get the "latest fix diskettes".

This might be a game to you, but it certainly isn't to us.  We are trying
to run a business here.  We believe that the job of our software engineers
is to write computer programs - not to spend all their time discovering and
documenting AIX bugs that have been discovered and documented a hundred times
before.  Because of IBM's idiotic support policy, we have to go throught a
lot of stupid gyrations just to try to find out about previously discovered,
and often resolved, bugs.

>	Remember Abigail's
>	Advice: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm speechless at the wisdom and insight this brings to the discussion.
Of course, Abigail never had to spend her time, or pay anyone else to
spend their time, trying to *find out* if it's broke or not, only to
discover that lots of other people already knew the answer to that.

jw