I don't think it's a coincidence that the weekly rant topic 365 is about enterprise support.

Gather around folks, I'll paint you a nice picture based on a true story, back from my sysadmin days. Listen up.
It's about HP and their Solaris 5.4/6 support.

- Yet another Prod Solaris dinosaur crashed
- Connected to console, found a dead system disk; for some reason it was not booting on the remaining redundant disk...
- Logged an HP vendor case. Sev1. SLA for response is 30 minutes, SLA for a fix is <24 hours
- It took them 2 days to respond to our Prod server outage due to failed system disks (responses "we are looking into this" do not count)
- it took another day for them to find an engineer who could attend the server in the DC
- The field engineer came to the DC 4 hours before the agreed time, so he had to wait (DC was 4-5 hours of driving away from HP centre)
- Turns out, he came to the wrong datacentre and was not let in even when the time came

- We had to reschedule for two days later. Prod is still down
- The engg came to the DC on time. He confirmed he had the FRU on him. Looks promising
- He entered the Hall
- He replaced the disk on the Solaris server
- It was the wrong disk he replaced. So now the server is beyond rebuild. It has to be built anew... but only after he comes back and replaces the actually faulty disk.
- He replaced that disk on the wrong Solaris server

It took AWS about a month to figure out why their load balancer was screwing up content length for requests from our site. Multiple times the ticket was closed due to inactivity because they took so long to investigate. Turns out there's a bug with how AWS load balancers scale, and when they are below a certain traffic threshold they truncate extremely long content. Their solution was to edit the balancer behind the scenes to always be scaled up, and then tell us to never delete it.

So then every time we needed to set up a staging environment we had to contact support so they'd edit the balancer. Which always took ages since most of the support agents didn't understand the convoluted issue and had to forward it on to more technically inclined staff, who then had to investigate fresh every time.

This was ridiculously annoying, so I spent months writing an automated solution to spin up staging new environments on the spot, this made use of a haproxy server which had to edit rules on the fly so that the AWS balancer could be circumnavigated. It was a better system then the old way anyway, but all the same an irritating issue to be forced to deal with.

All around a very shitty experience. This was a few years ago now and I'm not employed there any more, but I hope AWS fixed this since then.

Being told it might take up to 4 days for my internet connection to be fixed. After having 2 calls with the support to gather information:/

Worst support experience so far: German ISP sent their cheap default router which I opted for, hoping that I didn't need to rent a costly FitzBox. Provider activates the connection, everything fine, but slow and unstable on my Linux laptop only. Try using their website, their support chat etc. as they made it very hard to even open a support ticket. I gather all the information, ping, traceroute, netstat, logfiles, router settings, broadband measurement etc. and finally manage to open a support ticket of my issue adn they say they will send an engineer to my place in about 4 days. I stay at home that day and wait for the whole day, nothing happens!
I get back to them, even get a phone call after waiting about 1h in the waiting queue, only to listen to someone tell me that the appointment had been cancelled as the ticket had already been closed. WTF! They said they measured my connection and could not reproduce any error. Did not even mention my lengthy log files etc. It took my own research and another hint that there is an incompatibility with that specific router and some specific devices so I should really replace their cheap router with a FritzBox device. What they also did not tell, that you dont need to rent their branded FritzBox, there are cheap second hand models from another ISP that you can reconfigure by simply chosing another ISP in a dropdown list that contains every popular German ISP. But why are they popular? You can only choose between the different bad ones, that's why they don't seem to make an effort.

Quest.com APM software. Foglight. Terrible support site, terrible product, everything is terrible. Support engineers that still need to be explained the difference between disk space and inodes....

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