[rescue] Vendor software support [was Re: RPi vs SS20 benchmarks (interesting)]

[Mike Meredith]

On Fri, 1 Jan 2016 17:01:00 -0500 (EST), Mouse wrote:
> The only way I've gotten decent software support out of a vendor is to
> already personally know a geek inside the company - and, arguably,

The best story I have in relation to vendor support was way back in the
1990s when I was a clueless newbie. I had a problem with a new Dell
server running UnixWare 1.x - it was crashing and burning on a frequent
basis (several times a day). Of course I had vendor support from both
Dell and Novell(?); after about a month the vendor support had resorted
to finger pointing.

A quick post to USENET, and a USL engineer who had worked on it sent me
the patch to fix the issue - a problem with the driver for the EISA
version of the 3c509.

Support contracts are all very well as a due diligence measure, but you
need to use them carefully. Don't waste the time of your senior
engineers by making them raise the call; let them get on with trying to
solve the problem. Use your junior engineers to raise the call, and
they'll get exposed to stuff they wouldn't normally see and who knows?
Perhaps the vendor will come up with the solution.

--
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
  regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems.  -- Jamie Zawinski

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