Slashdot Mirror
Looking For Better Linux Customer Support?
Deven Phillips, CISSP asks: "Recently, the company that I work for bought some VA Linux servers for our network and Web site. I was the one who recommended VA, due to the idea that they would give good technical support. When we purchased the servers, we were a bit dismayed by the fact that VA would not install Mandrake on our servers. Never to be daunted, we ordered the servers, and installed Mandrake ourselves. One of the servers (our file server to be) wouldn't load, wouldn't boot, and wouldn't even give us a good error indication. This is exactly why we chose VA, customer support. We returned the server and requested an immediate replacement. We were told 'No problem'. After the 7th day, still not being built. At two and a half weeks we got our server. The server came back to us missing parts, and still suffering from the same problem we were having before!"
"What ever happened to tech support? It used to be that companies would trip over themselves to make customers happy. Today it seems that unless you are spending 1 million plus dollars, they could give a crap less. When spending $12K plus on a single server, you would expect that the thing would work, huh? Are there any vendors who do provide good all around customer support these days?"
If you need support, RTFM, and roll your own.
It appears that this type of approach by several GNU/Linux users is what creates a market where another OS *cough*cough*windows2k*cough* can thrive.
For an OS to be popular in the quantity many GNU/Linux users are looking for, the OS and USERS must be supportive and understanding to those who's abilities are not above average.
Justen Stepka
Just to balance with a Thinkpad horror story.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad 390X and an IBM Etherjet 10/100. I also ordered a 32meg ram upgraded for the Thinkpad 390X in addition to the base install of 64meg ram.
The delivery was 1 week late. The RAM upgrade did not come with the first shipment and eventually turned up a full month after the already late delivery. The Etherjet card did not work on delivery. The card was shipped back but the replacement didn't work either. At this point I've spent nearly $40 on long distance phone calls (no call centres in my city, and I'm only in the capital city of the whole damn country). They said it was my fault and that I was too incompetent to use the software (a preinstall of 98SE and the card won't work when I push it into the cardbus slot, how this is my fault I still can't fathom). They wanted me to pay shipping and the repair costs. I ranted and raved at this point. I got free shipping to an IBM service centre in a larger city who determined that the cards were OK so the laptop was broken. But they didn't have the authority to fix the laptop. They wanted somebody (either me or IBM) to agree to pay for the repair. Keep in mind this is a brand new laptop that hasn't worked since receiving it, but I'm getting messages that I'll have to pay for any repairs. Warranty? What's that?
At this point we're into the second month after delivery. I eventually get the hardware returned (after further ranting and raving). It takes 3 weeks for another service centre (yes, a different service centre, this one has the authority to fix IBM hardware under warranty) to agree that the laptop itself is broken. They shipped it to the USA where it floated about for a few weeks. I got the laptop back, with the card working, a full 3 months and 1 week after originally receiving it.
I got one emailed apology out of the whole ugly incident. Never any offers of free upgrades, or free support, or even some retribution for long distance phone calls and the 13 weeks of wasted time and unusable hardware. And to be honest and fair there were some delays that were entirely caused by me, but overall I was an extremely unimpressed person by the end of it.
Not wanting to wait any longer, I offered to drive to their office to pick it up once it was ready, as I lived nearby. When I arrived, it was sitting in a box at the receptionist's desk. No one even bothered to wait with it or to meet me and at least thank me for shelling out $4k for their hardware.
VA doesn't need to hire any more linux gurus, they need to hire some customer satisfaction experts. They'll never see another dime from me.
Recently we convinced our management to take the plunge and allow us to begin a conversion from SUN equipment and SunOS over to Linux.
I chose VA Linux as our vendor of choice because I felt they would be the best at providing both the hardware and the software support we needed. We're not exactly a tiny account, although we're not that large either. Maybe 100 to 150 boxes a year within my department and the potential for another 500 to 700 in other departments if the proper inroads could be made.
Well, the whole process of dealing with VA was one nightmare after another. We had missing orders. We had stuff showing up with incorrect parts installed or missing parts. We had a LOUSY salesman and when we asked for a different one, we were politely but firmly told to deal with him.
One thing that REALLY stuck in my craw was that we needed to put all of our equipment on to a 24/7 4hr support contract for all our deployed equipment. We wanted ONE contract that would include all of our servers and then we'd be able to add/remove as needed depending on their use. Cisco does this. Sun does this. Dell does this. Compaq does this. We asked for this last October. In April I even flew to California (from St. Louis) to sit with a VP of customer service and explain in detail exactly what I needed VA to provide. Well, we still don't have it and our machines will be leaving warranty in a couple months.
In June, I was again in California to meet with vendors regarding deployment of massively huge managed co-location facilities. I wanted to meet with VA for 2 hours to talk with them about what they could provide. Nobody could be made available. I can understand that since our trip was rather last minute, but even our sales guy never followed up after or offered to set up another meeting. Guess they didn't want the business.
In addition, the quality control has some issues. The FullON systems seem to be prone to PCI cards popping out during shipping, for example. This is, IMHO, an engineering defect. We've had several boxes we shipped out with ATM cards that we installed end up with the card loose at the destination. Trying to get a person with no computer knowledge to diagnose a loose card remotely is not pretty!
Finally, we just got tired of EVERY SINGLE ORDER getting screwed up in some way. Missing orders, wrong orders, delays, etc. We finally had to throw up our hands and go with another vendor (Compaq DL360s). We can't run a business otherwise.
I really like VA Linux. I think if they could get their act together they could take the Linux server market. But right now, they gotta get their shit in order. The days of apologizing and saying "Well...we're a growing company" are over. It's time to play with the big boys and offer service like the big boys.
In my last incarnation as a ssyadmin for a national ISP/telco, we used quite a few VA boxen, and got great responses. We had one ship w/ a bad drive, and they overnighted a new machine to us. The tech support guys are great (Hey Cron!) and didn't mind me asking weird-ass questions like "What's the byte-ordering on the data that comes back from /proc/temp?" when I was having toruble using a temp sensor card.
Dunno about you, but that goes above and beyond. If the machine booted w/ RedHat and their CD's, as far as I'm concerned you brought any liability on yourself when it failed.
I've been pretty impressed with their quality of tech support. We have two of their boxes, one of which runs the stock Redhat-ish thing they ship and one of which runs Debian. When the Debian box had a bad SCSI cable, they overnighted us a replacement with no questions asked. Other than that we've had no problems at all with their hardware (as for Redhat's general suckiness, it's not really their fault...I just wish they'd start shipping with Debian.
va doesn't do redhat. VA installs Debian. Tell me where exactly windows 98 comes into this picture and why someone should be expected to shell out money for it.
First of all win98 doesn't run on all hardware, There are many raid controllers that won't work at all with win98. Why are you expecting someone to shell out extra money to buy win98.
you are horribly uninformed and should check your facts before posting.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids! (obligatory scooby doo reference)
:)
I'll not even start in on your pathetic ploy at reverse-reverse-reverse-psychology that is a sad cry for a +1 funny moderation.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
IBM has transfered a lot of their mainframe tech over to the mid-range line, and these things are looking solid. The failover stuff is nice, and a lot of the little things they include for troubleshooting make support a lot easier.
I can't speak for the Linux boxes, but they did manage to make some WinNT boxes solid, so I'm sure the penquins will be alright as well.
--sugarman--
People who can't articulate their problems basically put themselves last in line for tech support, that's just reality; so either way you read it, it's hard to have any sympathy for this momo.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Our HP NetServer LH6000's are running like a top. They did come with the wrong RAID BIOS, so Red Hat wouldn't recognize the RAID drives. Tech Support was very efficient and pointed us right to the problem. These are $40K+ boxes (6-way Xeon, 1GB RAM, 6x18GB RAID5). We are running Sybase 11.0.3 (about to move to 11.9.2) on them.
HP seems committed to providing the same level of support for Linux on Intel as they have for HPUX on PA-RISC. They are even offering Linux-oriented training courses through their educational programs.
Of course, supply on some parts, like the Xeons, is variable and the delivery time for one of these servers is way slow. And don't even think of running Mandrake (or really any distribution other than Red Hat) on the big boxes. The hardware support just isn't there.
We also have a couple HP LPr's, which have been selling on Onsale for cheap.
For smaller stuff, we have a slew of Penguin Computing 1RU servers. We order whatever Penguin has in stock because the delivery time is everything.
We also are using the Penguin Computing dual-head workstations for development systems. I'm not thrilled with how the Matrox G400 stretches a single desktop across both monitors (my dialogs pop up in the crack in between) but who am I to complain. Penguin also does a very good with their preinstalled distribution on their workstations. Upgraded kernel, Xi Graphics X Server, etc., etc.
Well, to comment on the customer support from the professional side of things. I work in a major high tech company in a customer support role. I do things like Patch writing, problem analysis, and outage recovery. One thing I have noticed about my company, and my group is that we will go out of our way to try to assist a customer if the problem is with another product, weather it be another product from within our company or another product from a competitor. Also, we will also try to assist when the customer is running an unsupported config.
The idea is to place our customer service above the rest. Taking that extra step ensures they will come back and buy more.
-Ghost
I'm not entirely surprised by your experience. This isn't to say that VA is a bad company, because I'm sure they please a lot of people a lot of the time, but they are appealing to those who want to or need to spend less on a server. When price, not service, is the selling point expect to be dissatisfied with the service now and then. Contrast this with Sun who is trying to sell a service and you will see an entirely different model.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I have to agree with this. The company I work for ordered a dual-proc Penguin box we needed real fast. They were nice enough to hand-truck it over to us (we're on Mission street in San Francisco) rather than delay it further by shipping it. In addition, they provided us with a second hard drive which was the wrong type and they _immediately_ came by and gave us a replacement when we notified them. They've always been helpful and they have never made me regret our purchase. Plus, we got a cute stuffed penguin... awww. -C
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
I've seen a lot of posts here about how he installed Mandrake instead or RedHat. If any of you that were so quick to point that out... Redhat wouldn't install on a machine that failed to POST either. The guy here (at least I thought) made it clear that it was a hardware problem.
No OS runs on a computer that will not power on.
The best, most competent people in tech support leave. There is no incentive for a very good tech support person to stay in tech support, they don't get credit, accolades or cash.
Unfortunately, this is only too true..
The people who enjoy it usually end up being really good, and still get paid squat. So they use those same skills to get elsewhere. What you have left is the "Hu-yuk! I can make good money here! This is much better than my McDonalds job!" folks, who have even less of a clue than a fair amount of the people who call up.
I enjoyed my tech support job. It was fun, occasionally challenging, and, once they calmed down, most of the customers were pretty cool. They even paid decently. But now I'm getting paid twice as much for being a developer, and I'm given much more respect and recognition.
You know you da man... And we love our NAS, and yep, the original poster wasn't talking about the NAS, but I recommend it even if it is "BETA" and VA won't give us a CD until it's finished. :)
I love VA, and your tech support was top notch imho.
I mean for chrissakes, you ship with blackbox as the default wm, what more can I say.
please do. and tell him to get working on enlightenment 0.17 instead of just sitting around poking his nose and practising southern german slang...
-8<--
Hard Drives: You must buy the machine with a Quantum Atlas SCA disk.
Now, we buy lots of Seagate SCA disks well in advance, so we wanted to use what we already own, not to mention that we've found Quantum drives to be very unreliable (they died too often). So, we just wanted machines with no disks. Not possible with VA.
Drive sleds: VA was very reluctant to send us empty disk rails for use in futute disks that we may add as needed. They wanted to sell a Quantum drive with it. They ultimately allowed this but they gave us a much bigger hassle over this than they should have. We should be allowed to buy whatever drive we want.
Anyway, we now buy our systems from AS Labs which sport nicer cases (made by Intel) and none of the hassles (they ship with 4 bare drive chassis by default! What a concept!)
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
He said they got two machines. One worked fine and the other did not. The sent the one that did not work back. After two weeks they got the broken machine back, with parts missing.
Hardly, a distro problem.
troy
Yeah, well, that's a separate consideration. I was just posting that as a parody of slashdot lunacy, and look what it got me. -1 Troll. :)
:)
Just goes to show that sarcasm doesn't always translate well into print.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Software support: only use the standard configuration where possible. Your support will be better, because they are dealing in known quantities.
Hardware support: send it back, hope they make good on it. Sounds like they messed this one up.
Past that, VA Linux systems seem severely overpriced. I'm sure they use excellent components, put it together for you, and give you a working system. But I'd rather do it myself, and it sounds like you would too... so we're probably not their target audience.
I have a feeling they're marketing to clueless companies who want a "Linux Solution" and don't know the first thing about it. Therefore, they get a nice box, a stock configuration, and tech support, and they pay a healthy premium for it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
no matter what the company, you will find those that praise or flame them. As for getting back a server that still suffered from the same problem, bad show on VA's part. Not to mention the slothlyness shown in getting it to you. However, going to a platform that they don't support doesn't win you the nobel prise either. Typicly there are reasons that a company doesn't support things. Always make damn sure how something like that can effect your warrenty. Not to mention, get it in writting.
Every company I've delt with has given me an equal share of great service right along with the crappy. It's just how things work. You can't please everyone all the time. But don't you wish they'd still try?
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
One question though, did the server boot with Red Hat installed?
Um... if IBM didn't have their ass onsite in less than 2 hrs for a major problem with any of our RS/6000 boxes the prez of IBM Canada would hear about it. But those suckers are a wee bit more than 12 large. One time we had a malfunctioning backplane in one of our systems... within 24 hours we had had the problem escalated through 3 support levels to some of their top North American specialists and replaced practically the entire node, not to mention having two techs onsite - one of them was here for 15 hrs straight. (The error that was coming up in POST didn't point to what the actual problem was so it took 'em awhile to find it). Point being if you are buying expensive hardware you can and should expect top notch service. However IBM would've told us to go blow ourselves if we'd tried to put Linux or BSD on their hardware and were calling for support, just because that is not part of their support contract with us. I expect that pretty soon we'll be trying Linux on some of those boxes as we are on our S/390, and then IBM would be on the hook for any problems even if they were running IBM OK'ed Linux version. Just my 2 cents (worth 1.2 US cents).
----
----
Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
Not being able to boot can be a symptom of either hardware or software. If the problem is hardware it should be fixed. If the problem is software, VA should say "bite me". In neither case should it take 2.5 weeks to get back a partial server.
And actually, if this is a software problem, using RedHat probably wouldn't fix it. Booting is just lilo and the kernel, neither of which is distro-specific.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I have gone through similar problems with major vendors as well. One major vendor actually required one of the techs to install NT over Linux to prove the HARDWARE problem wasn't linux, even though they claim (loudly) to support linux.
We evaluated 3 other vendors at that point.
Didn't see a single sales rep from any other vendor, even though we buy $150k+ of servers every year, and 300k+ of workstations.
Except IBM.
IBM showed up with a sales rep, and a support engineer to demo the units. Left 3 with us to test for 2 months!!!, and we called support whenever we needed. We didn't however, call any 1-800-go-away numbers...we had/have the phone and cell number of the support engineer for our area.
We decided on IBM.
the first order, they checked, found a couple of errors, and called with 3 questions on it.
They worked with our vendor (state contract) to get us the stuff in short order.
Now that we are buying from them, we have:
The telephone, fax, pager, email, cell phone, etc for both the sales rep, AND THE SUPPORT ENGINEER.
I haven't spoken to some generic so-and-so since we started buying from them.
I haven't ever had them complain about our distributions, or the things we are doing.
In fact, I've been overjoyed by thier support.
And the online pricing and server configuration stuff at thier website makes spec'ing servers for projects a breeze.
I strongly recommend you speak with them.
If anyone is particularly interested in speaking with our specific sales rep, drop me a line, and I'll send you her email and phone, etc.
I actually hit the wrong speed dial on Christmas Eve, and got the sales rep on her cell phone. She answered!!!!
Steven Walker
Network Systems Coordinator
Central Missouri State University
swalker@cmsu1.cmsu.edu
As usual, the opinions expressed are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer.
Why fight uphill? I would just accept a Red Hat system, verify it works, back it up, then customize as you see fit. Dual boot is even better.
I used to buy hardware and software for a major university's Computer Science Department. I learned eventually that vendors say "no" for a reason: competance. If the vendor isn't willing to sell you something, or if they're hesitant, it's probably a warning sign. Vendors are increasingly limited on what they're able to do well. This applies equally well to big and large vendors, hardware and software.
I tried asking Uncle Ed's garage-built computers to do SCSI systems. They couldn't tell fast wide from narrow from IDE. I tried getting major name-brand manufacturers to sell me a SCSI system that actually had SCSI components other than hard drives (CD-ROM, DVD, etc). Little success.
I learned this way to stick to what the vendors will readily do. As soon as you ask them to step out of their comfort zone, you're going to be on your own. You might as well save yourself the trouble.
Either find a vendor that lists something ready-made that fits your bill, or plan to do it yourself.
Paco is an employee of Tovaris, Inc. who speaks his own mind and not theirs.
My goof on the 2.5 weeks. This is, sadly, by a lot of standards still very good turn around. I have no idea the particularls as to why 2.5 weeks was needed, but I suspect someone at VA could explain it to you.
You comment about hardware on the other hand is absolutely rediculous. It presumes that a measurement of the quality of some hardware is whether a bug free driver has been committed to the Linux kernel. By those standards most of the new hardware that is being developed is "shitty".
A lot of VA's hardware is optimized for the server environment. In many cases there is specific hardware out there which provides benefits beyond other alternatives. If such hardware is not well supported by the standard Linux kernel but it's in VA's interest to use it, they will develop the necessary code themselves (this is, btw, how open source works). Many distributions are not focused in this direction (Mandrake has publicly stated they are focused on workstations) and don't want to add changes which haven't been committed into the Linus' kernel, or which they have not had the time to validate themselves (as well they should). Such is life.
I'm not sure why it was deemed necessary to install Mandrake on the server, but I'll assume it was necessary. Part of determining that it's necessary should involve recognizing that the circumstances which did happen COULD happen, and accepting that risk. If you really want to have Mandrake on the system, go to Mandrake's site and they'll point you to hardware vendors which sell systems with Mandrake pre-installed.
If you'd installed NT on the system and it hadn't worked, who would you be blaming? Who should you be blaming?
sigs are a waste of space
I work for a HUGE company that should have mattered to them as a potential future customer, and I ordered a measly quantity of four (4) fully loaded FullOn's (came to somewhere around $100K I think). The sales team SUCKED. The Support Guys SUCKED. We sent hardware back and forth with them for MONTHS until we finally got what we ordered (which was clearly laid out on the original PO, and which they did claim to sell as standard equipment).
I'm not using them again. It would have been less hassle to build the machines myself, drop RedHat in, and start working from there on the cluster s/ware.
11*43+456^2
Working at HP as a contractor on the support side, their standard warranty was (is?) "Return to Bench", meaning you send the box back. Onsite support in 4 hrs, 24/365 for mission critical systems was about as much per year as the hardware itself in some instances. HP sells it as insurance, since the company looks at what four biz days of downtime costs (shut down assembly line, customers can't withdraw funds from the bank yadda yadda yadda.) And they make a very pretty penny doing it.
My current shop on the other hand, the VA box I mentioned earlier is not (yet) mission critical. It's a workgroup development web server, not one of our live to the world machines. So, I can understand when we're not sending money VA's way for an onsite tech, the turnaround is a business week.
That said, we let our displeasure be known with the account rep and, whoa, suddenly lots of VA swag shows up on my desk. Apologies around and what not. I do expect, though, if the box failed under production circumstances, that we could get someone out onsite in a matter of hours. At least, I hope.
That said, we're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot by running Mandrake over what VA set us up with. I'd imagine we'd get some puzzled looks and the instruction to restore the system to the original OS config and update as needed from that tree.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Customer service is also a major problem at IndyBox Systems. My company ordered an $11K server from them in order to see whether they were a good supplier. When we placed the order, they gave us an initial ship date about three weeks hence.
When we were about to hit the end of that three week period, I called to see where we were in process. I was quite dismayed to find out that our box was not yet in manufacturing due to an unspecfied "parts shortage". I called about twice a week for the next two weeks and kept getting the sames excuse.
During this period, I never received a call from IndyBox to explain the situation. I always had to call them. Also, their customer service line seemed to be manned by only one person who wasn't there over half the time; I mostly left voice messages which were never returned. I did ask, a couple of times, to speak to the service manager, but I was told that he was in a different building and that he could not transfer my call
Anyway, about six weeks after we had placed the order, I was informed that our box was finally in production and that we could expect it in another 10 days. That deadline passed, and IndyBox never called to explain. When one of my techs called them, they used the parts shortage excuse once again
Finally, in another week, we found out that our box was ready but that the customer service person was delaying our shipment because my tech had been "rude" to him in our last phone call. I sent some FAX'es and emails about the situation, but never got a response.
The box arrived; it work's OK, even though I'm not greatly impressed by the build quality. The rackmount rails are a joke. And to add insult to injury, IndyBox shorted us on parts which they have yet to fulfil four months later
Suffice to say, I will never consider purchasing from them again
Well said Mullen.
I too want to see an in-house built server here at work. Unfortunately, I would never get the funding to set it up myself nor do I think that my department will even buy a stand alone server for what is needed (it will be a dual processor FreeBSD box).
However, since I am building a similar machine for a much harsher environment (my Jeep), it may have a prayer of happening.
I guess that was a long way of getting to the point that these guys would never go for a new server because they are just not familiar with how inexpensively they can be put together. Once the concept is proven on my own dime then, maybe, we will get approval for a dedicated, built in house, server for this database.
Anyway, I agree with you, the best way is to build it yourself.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
If you email me offline at landman@sgi.com, I might be able to make things happen.
I looked into what happened with this ticket and, after having talked with this customer and gotten his ok to post about it, would like to share with you what happened, where we made mistakes and what we are doing to fix this.
As noted in the post, one of the machines that the customer recieved had some problems coming up. This was a problem with the raid subsystem that prevented boot up.
After a telephone conversation, Mr. Phillips sent the machine back to us to work on it.
We replaced a drive in this machine shipped it back, and the problem was still there. The machine shipped out working, all I can assume is that a shipper dropped the machine (hard) or something.
Once he recieved the machine and it still ahd the problem, we opted to build him a new machine. During burn in there was problem with the memory that necessitated the replacement of memory and retesting. This is park of the 2 week delay we talks of.
So while hardware failures during shipping happen, we made a clear mistake by not keeping the customer informed of the delays in burn in.
Then we shipped the machine back to him.
At this point we discovered that we forgot to add an extra nic that was part of his order.
Again, our bad, we screwed up. He took the nic from the original faulty server (he kept it while we worked up a new one for him) and put it in the machine, which worked fine.
At this point it was 30 days or so from when he received the first bad machine in his order or 4 machines.
We saw the /. post when it went up on slashdot, called the customer and talked with him regarding the screwups on our part and to make sure he that the machines were (now) working fine and that there wasn't anything new that we didn't know about. There wasn't. And he was very surprised it had gone up on slashdot :-)
So there you go, that's the whole story a mixture of human error and lack of notification on our part, burn in delays, and shipping issues combined to make a bad customer experience which we clearly regret.
All I can say is that the human error can be minimized to a great degree, shipper problems can be pretty out of our control (we do use sturdy shipping containers, but you wouldn't believe what we've seen happen in shipping) and communication is now in an improved state and be clear all of our techs know that keeping the customer continually informed is the right way to do things.
So there you go, if anyone has any questions, you can post them here, email me at jritter@valinux.com or call at 408-542-5722.
As a side note, a lot of people have posted that the customer doesn't deserve support and got what was coming to him since he removed our software load. That's totally incorrect, VA still has a responsibility to ship good product and support said product. When someone replaces our load, we still try to support it, but it does make it harder and increases troubleshooting time. Note that hardware support doesn't go away becuase of mandrake being installed.
I want to assure people that while this was bad, it is the exception, while it seems weird to say this here and now, VA has a very good record of dealing with support issues. If you have any questions about how we do things here, please post them and I'll answer them here.
Jeff Ritter
Support Manager, VA Linux Systems
Hrmmm...
Would you happen to know who makes Yahoo's Boxes... You don't seem to mention them..
Thx
I have nothing but good things to say about VA. Jason and Zack assisted our team in pulling of an extremely sucessful project.
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
No, I don't work for them. Just my recommendation.
Got a beef? Plug a name into the Bizarre Rumour Generator!
Kudos to
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
I have had some experience with Linux Based dealers and I have had nothing but trouble with support. I now work for the 3rd largest Cable TV/Internet company in the world now and I have learned that going with NT and Compaq servers with RAID controllers setup with RAID0 is the best choice for any company looking for a good server. I don't know about Compaq's support for Linux but if it's as good as the NT support plan (platinum) then that is were I would get Linux servers.
The bottom line is that you have brought this on yourself by choosing to go your own way. If you are not going to run their supported configuration, there is no point in buying from VA -- buy from whoever's cheapest instead.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
It's like RPMs -- one person figures out the configuration for a certain distribution, and burns those rules into the RPM. Then anyone can install the RPM rather than having to learn how to configure that particular tarball.
Now you're trying to to read way too much into that analogy.
"Please think about things before you make a non-sensical comparison."
No way. I know you're trying to make a difference in the world or something, but someday you will realize that the world makes NO SENSE to begin with. So stop trying to stuff me into your idea of what makes sense and get on with your life so I can get on with my own. Thank you.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
What ever happened to the good old days when tech support could just say --- "Yes, thats related to a bug in Windows -- and wont be fixed until the next release, sorry not our problem..." Now in the Linux world people need to have the skill and the know how because the source is their to fix any problem....As to before they could pay someone $6 bucks an hour to say "Not our problem"....
Now we can "Call their bluffs" when they try to take the easy route....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Got a beef? Plug a name into the Bizarre Rumour Generator!
Um, am I the only one who read it as saying that one of the servers wouldn't boot at all? Does this really have anything to do with Mandrake? Even -if- that was due to them installing Mandrake, why in the hell did VA ship a box with parts missing?
Well, we're gonna buy Dells (I'd actually decided this some time ago, because the VA boxes only have one power supply). I'm pretty sure we'll get better support than the poster mentioned.
Dammit! What happened to the fact that all linuces were essentially the same? since when did diversification make 'em mutex?
*is glad for his 'distributed' distribution*
~A
Linux, Vai, Satch and Guitars.. that is the life ICQ# 7357858
Your story evoked very little sympathy from me. I'm sure VA would have installed a nice distro for you that would have worked fine. Instead, you opted for a machine with no os and cried when you couldn't get your disto to install. From your story I couldn't tell if the computer was ever really broken, or if you just couldn't get it to work. If you want customer support from someone you need to take their whole package, not pick and choose. Frankly, what disturbs me is that VA shipped you a computer with no OS. They should have sold you a standard product and made you erase whatever it was they _did_ support. The fact they sold it with no OS hints at a lax or non-existent testing/burn-in program. You can buy off the shelf adapters to put a Chevy engine in many Ford vehicles. Does that mean a dealer should be expected to sell Ford cars with Chevy engines, or, like your request, no engine, so that you can do the conversion yourself, only to have the car returned when you can't get it to work?
1) we were a bit dismayed by the fact that VA would not install Mandrake on our servers
:).
VA servers ship with VA's own flavor of Red Hat. This is a Good Thing because VA has put a lot of work into the kernel and other drivers to better support their hardware.
Speaking on the server side, why would you want to install Mandrake? What -- again on the server side -- does Mandrake provide that VA's Linux does not?
2) One of the servers (our file server to be) wouldn't load, wouldn't boot, and wouldn't even give us a good error indication.
We recieved a VA server that had clearly been dropped before shipping. Without even turning it on (the power switch was damaged) we repacked it and sent it back.
It was pretty clear that VA hasn't ramped up their support operation as fast as they've ramped up other areas but still, after a few hiccups we got our server back along with a great box of VA swag
I think (hope) that this is a temporary issue that VA will have to learn from, but I don't think it's part of some master VA plan to screw the little guy out of support.
Since it came configured as a server, I did have one minor software-related glitch. I use gnuplot to produce dynamic output for the webserver, and RH 6.2 configured as a server didn't have that installed. This problem took about 60 seconds to solve, since I had to go get a library from another machine to make it all work.
My employer, a Federal Agency, prefers Dell as a just-in-time supplier. I got a quote for an almost identically equipped Dell server, and it was $2400 more than the VA rack-mount box.
I use Linux-Mandrake 7.1 at home and on several of my workstations at work because I like the ease of setting up ReiserFS, but after hearing this story, I'm glad I left my machine configured as shipped.
You may have been dealing with Acer, which is about as close to the bottom of the barrel as you can get. I know IBM rebadges some Thinkpads from gear originally produced by Acer.. The 390X may be one of them.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
The reason for doing this -
In this case, tech support and blame shifting are not part of the equation at all. It's just a matter of effectively using finite time and getting the best system I can out in production. I did build my home system from components from a several different on-line vendors, though. :)
Of course, in all cases, I specified the parts to be used, and all of my requirements were met with the exception of ASLab and I disagreeing on which vendor's RAM should be used for the NetBSD box. They were nice enough to ship it with everything but the RAM, though, which I ordered from Mushkin and dropped in without issue.
Presumably because they think they'll get all the advantages I listed. Or the PHB's are calling the shots.You want awesome service? Try Handspring.
I bought a handspring, and love it. Two months after getting it, I tried to put it into my shirt pocket while walking up some stairs. I missed the pocket, it fell, hit the stairs, bounced over the edge...
my heart stopped...
It fell three floors and landed flat on concrete. If it wasn't in it's padded case it would have flew apart into a thousand pieces. As it was, the screen and case were totally fractured.
Since I bought it on VISA I had a replacement warranty through that. But when I called up Handspring to get the info I needed for VISA, and explained that it was destroyed through my own stupid mistake, they said "Oh, don't bother, we will just send you a free replacement."
Wow.
It arrived three days later by FedEx, and had nice clear instructions and a FedEx shipping label to send the dead one back. All I had to do was HotSync and I was up and running.
Excellent! HandSpring Rules!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Are used for reading motherboard stats - like temperature and fan speed and similar. Can be useful on a server - set up snmp to read them and graph it with mrtg - and bam, a pretty graph for the marketing-droids to sell to the customers as a value added service...
Surely a default kernel for a distribution should be optimized for compatibility rather than features though?
We use Debian on our servers - and have given up on finding a supplier for software support - we do all of that in house, but we always buy branded kit with an SLA on the hardware support... In a production environment a 24x7x4hr SLA is a lot more use than a return to base warranty... IMHO anyways...
These companies do exist. I know because I used to run one. Why did I go elsewhere? Because in general no one is willing to pay for people to come in and fix their systems again and again as the employees make the same mistakes over and over again.
By the third time you re-install an app or an OS (I ended up dealing mostly with MS-Windows :( ), The client is convinced that their people can't be breaking things this much!
As someone else said, managers tend to hire big-name companies if they can afford it. If they can't afford it, they hire a local crew. Either way, they expect the same level of performance. This means among other things, doing all work after hours and issuing large credits whenever they think they deserve it.
The market is ripe for a group to come in and support the small to mid-range people that want Linux/BSD/UN*X and it's stability and features, but are too small to attract the big boys
--
As an enthusiastic RatHed user, I would still suggest looking at debian, or slack, in minimal mode, for a server. They are, unlike mandrake, well tested, and adhere (more closely) to the KISS principle- "keep it simple, stupid", and WORK.
Mandrake really isn't particularly solid, it's the win98 of the linux world. If you want it on your own workstation, fair enough- assuming you tighten the default config enough so that it doesn't get owned and used to attack others
However, sticking it on a server will risk a lot of other folks, too. Yes, I hear the malcontents muttering "distro wars"; not a bit of it. I'm not saying "use this distro, all others suck", more "don't use this one for this job, it's not suitable". Hell, use FreeBSD if you like, just think twice about putting mandrake on a *server*.
Some people applaud mandrake's ease of use; this is fine on a playbox at home, for learning. We all have to start somewhere, right? However, when you're providing a server, it's downright dangerous to be so ill-informed that you're unable to make it work without resorting to "click here to start". It gets even worse if you have it on the public internet- on an RBOC in the US, there are so many kiddies scanning netblocks that a default mandrake box will be rooted in 15 minutes. A clueful non-klicker would have shut stuff down, set up ipchains and logging etc, before plugging it all in. Someone who needs a gui to install the O/S may not even be aware of these issues.
Taking a few minutes to even read something basic like Lance Spitzner's nice little essay on armouring linux (http://www.enteract.com/~lspitz/linux.html) would help a lot of folks. He wrote it for an intelligent novice, and it will stop them being such an easy target. Automated gui-installers and automated hardening scripts are no replacement for a little care.
Ah well, I am sure I'll get flamed to hell.com and back by eye bulging teenage naked-woman-theme swapping mandrake-klickers, but this is what I found down the years. When I do use linux on a server, I'd be likely to choose a more robust flavour. Watch me get moderated down for this, but then, I'll have the last laugh when these servers are either smoking on the LAN, or owned on the net.
Sad but true.
-A-
HP have a certification program for tested configs of hardware and Linux. This allows you to pick a combo that you know has already been verified. They even have docs that list specific deviations (LC4r and HP NetRAID for example) from their spec. that are required to make things run. If you call tech. support, they are matter of fact when you state your OS. Very nice. And I have a big honkin' LH4 running like a charm, as well as Netservers.
I dont get this. Slashdot readers are a group techincal people who should be making their own servers. Why are people buying prebuild crap from companies that treat them like crap?
I had to make 3 servers, and I just got online and searched around and got the parts. Made sure the SCSI controllers worked with FreeBSD (We are a FreeBSD shop). Looked around a few places, got some killer deals on good hardware and found a couple places that I could recommend to others.
I my whole point is that when you order and build the stuff yourself, you know what is in the server and know where it is in the computer (PCI Slot 1 and all that). You know the memory makers, and the harddrive makers. I have build whole computer labs where I speced out the whole thing and went to a shop and told them this is what I wanted. They put it together, but I opened them all up to verify what they did.
It seems that if my ass was on the line, I would not trust anyone to make an important server for me. I would make it, and if I was the boss, I personally hold the person who bought the machine on the same level as though they built it themselves. None of this, "But it is VA's fault!" crap. I would still demote or fire someone who bought a bad product or built a crappy server.
A Man's work is a reflection of himself.
Maybe its just me.
Linux O Muerte!
And if you go with sun for servers, and are paying the price avoid the sun PCI products at all costs.
I've been working on sun equipment since the SUN-2, and my experience has been that sun PCI stuff has no better MTBF than PC PCI stuff, and the parts can be hard to get in a hurry. Worse, you still pay the premium.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
You might like to check out GND (www.gnd.co.uk), who are involved in the London Linux User Group. Their only flaw is that they don't update their web site fast enough, so I'd be inclined to phone for prices, if you're interested..
Sure, they cost a little more than the average box shifter, but they use good quality parts, and have tonnes of linux and BSD clues.
They're only a little outfit, but their customer service is first class- like the time they stayed till 10 at night building me a new server, in a hurry. You can't pay for that sort of backup.
They're the sort of comapny which phones you to warn you that there's a major new upgrade for your mobo bios, they really go the extra mile to make your life easy.
Note, I am not on a cut, nor do I work for them, I just love their service, and their boxes.
-A-
the fact that Mandrake and Red Hat are pretty much the same bloated pieces of crap that most Linux distributions have become before you purchase any form of Linux from a vendor, regardless of their technical support.
-Not Advocating any [use slackware] Distributions as to not start [or BSD] a Holy War, just [redhat sucks] telling it like [debian rules] it is.
--
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A couple of years ago, our lab (based on my recommendation) purchased five VA workstations. Four of the workstations shipped with bad partition tables. When I called VA about it, they didn't believe me, and I had to argue with them for days before they would even consider that there was a problem. Support was obnoxious and slow to respond.
- ------------
- ------------
When I took the drives back to be repartitioned and reinstalled, they dropped and destroyed one of the drives. When I got the drives back, they had been configured for single-processor workstations with the wrong ethernet card. I had asked them several times not to install lilo to the MBR, but they did anyway.
I spent more time dealing with VA hassles than if I had built and installed the machines myself. I recommended VA because I wanted to support a 'pure' Linux company, but I got burned by it, big time. All the Linux nay-sayers around the division got a big kick watching me deal with all these hassles, and they used it as ammunition to shoot down my attempts to get Linux supported officially by the division.
I really don't understand how VA has become as successful as they are given their mediocre hardware, high prices, and lousy support.
-Mark
-----------------------------------------------
Mark B. Allan NASA Ames Research Center
QSS Group, Inc. Neuro-Engineering Lab
650 - 604 - 0461 (lab) Mail Stop 269-2
650 - 604 - 3594 (fax) Moffett Field, CA 94035
mallan@ptolemy--nospam--.arc.nasa.gov
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/ne.html
-----------------------------------------------
"Good people drink good beer"
We ordered 7 VA Linux servers for the company I work for. The first thing we did when they got here was slick the box and put FreeBSD on all of them. Never even booted the Linux software. Servers work great!
VA's pricing is actually pretty good. I bought a couple of machines from them about 3 months ago. I compared their prices to building the same machines from parts from local clone shops (and this is in Vancouver, where computer parts are really cheap). Turns out the VA boxes are only about 15% more, and they come in great little 1 and 2 RU cases you can't really put together yourself (you need at least a 4 RU case for normal PC parts).
....
;) Still haven't sorted that out. They also shipped an 18GB drive instead of a 36GB drive as a spare on one of the original systems. We returned that, too, and have yet to receive the 36GB.
Well worth it for rack-mount systems at least.
However
One of the systems we bought was damaged in transit. It took them almost 3 weeks to replace it. We shipped the broken one back, and they sent us a third one
VA has really serious RMA-handling problems. They replace the systems, and their tech support seems good, but they have some process problems. I'm glad to see they're paying attention to this discussion. It doesn't matter how good your systems are - service is everything.
Nearly every tech company, software or hardware, provides separate 'support packages' for their corporate customers who buy several hundred computers and their home customers who buy one. Does anyone know which companies have different employees who are dedicated each type? Calls from a reasonably knowledgeable IT person would likely require a different starting point than those from grandma.
I have never used anyone's tech support for my home system so I don't have any experience there but the few corporate calls I've had to make began with questions like "do you know how to get to a command prompt?"
I would imagine staffing the corporate support group with full blown geeks would be cost prohibitive but I'd expect there is some money to be made somehow, given the ridiculous fees most comnpanies now pay for nearly worthless support.
Icebox
This is very true when I worked tech support for a ISP *everything* was our fault because they wanted to use tha machine to connect to the Internet. Very very true.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
We've been experiencing similar problems with VA recently. Within the last year, we've had 2 RAID problems. The first time, it took over a month to work out the issue (we had to wait for a new scsi cable, then a new backplane, then a new card - which finally fixed the problem). VA was in no hurry to send parts (I had to bug them four times before the replacement Mylex 960 was finally sent).
Recently, our RAID died after a power outage (overheated, I think). It's a production system, but it took them four days to get a replacement Mylex 1100 to us, only to replace our current card and find that it is actually the disk array. VA refused to send us a new one as a replacement - they told us to send ours back and they would fix it, but wouldn't guarantee data integrity (eg, if they erased it, tough).
I've been terribly disappointed with how much trouble it takes for us to get past level 1 tech support, especially since, up until about a year ago we provided VA with more than half of all their business.
We've tried other vendors (Aspen Systems for one), but they haven't been able to ship something without it getting damaged in transit (three times now!).
Certainly tempts me to open my own hardware business...
geoff@uslinux.net
http://uslinux.net
If people are going to use software other than what the vendor supports, they should be prepared and skilled enough to manage their software and troubleshoot to a point they can be certain the software is not the cause. If after this point the vendor can't provide proper support for a piece of hardware (unless they are openly blaming Mandrake for causing the problem), then the vendor is to be blamed.
What's wrong? well, it used to be that you wanted to please the customer. But now all companies want to do is please shareholders, and that means PROFITS!
-- Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam
What's even better is Oracle's trained monkies (in general) suck. We've gotten terrible support from them, often being told two completly different answers for the same question. If MySQL could handle the load and had some of the features we need, we wouldn't be paying Oracle one red cent.
The only fault that you can find with VA in this is sending the server back minus a few parts. I'm sure VA has much more profound problems as a company.
How about if you post an interview with a disgruntled employee who is willing and eager to trash the reputation of the company?
Speaking of that, is Raster ready to quit yet?
This story leaves out too many details. What warranty did you have? Usually you can pay more and get an overnight replacement warranty. If that's what you had you're better off calling someone at VA than posting to /.
The Bottom line is, no matter how good a company is, you'll always find an instance or two where they have a bad experience. I've used Dell for years and 9 out of 10 times I get the parts I want when I need them. But, last time, it wasn't nearly that easy. Maybe you just had one bad experience.
There once was a time when tech support could answer these things, but, alas, anyone in tech support who know the first thing about hardware or software wanted to make a living wage. #1 problem is tech support just doesn't pay, hence many companies throw you to the Helpdesk, which is staffed by people who can help with the most general things. I often try to blow past them for someone who really knows the stuff, a software or hardware engineer. Companies don't like to put these people on the phone, because spending $60/hr for someone to do tech support doesn't make "Good business sense" to them. Get used to it.
;-)
Be your own best friend, learn about the hardware, OS and applications and then hold out for a fatter paycheck.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In the early days the calls were usually quite complex, usually concerning connectivity between disparate machines or getting some 3rd party tool to work in some way not envisaged by the manufacturers.
In later years we just became a helpline for any fool who would call us. I once spent 3 hours trying to determine why a mail system had lost a vast amount of mail, only to discover that the fool that called me had deleted the directory and wanted to find an excuse to cover his back. I also wasted a whole day looking into a filesystem problem which didn't exist, instead of a network device driver issue due to some idiot not being able to read me the last line in a log file, and instead reading the line 5 entries from the end.
I pity the poor sods working in that department now, if they have anyone left!
It's good you realize the value of customer support. I can't believe the number of linux people who just don't get this.
However, to get good support for linux you need to not only run linux, but a _supported_distribution_ of linux. Much as people want all linuxes to be the same, they aren't. As you've discovered.
We looked at VA also, and probably would have gone with them if they hadn't required their own distribution of linux. We require stock redhat, and definitely don't want our vendor differentiating by using weird drivers that may or may not end up integrated into the _baseline_ kernel tree at a later date.
Some of the folks here have been having good luck with PSSC for hardware with linux support. I gather one of our clients just purchased a Coppermine machine from them that requires no funky drivers - which'll help keep our costs down when it's time to upgrade the machine.
Largest reseller of Comapq (IA and Alpha), IBM (IA and RISC), and Intel - we'll load whatever you want. We have production capacity for 40,000+ systems a month. We have an entire division dedicated to service. http://www.pios.com
Even casual involvement excludes total freedom by it's inherent nature. John Valby
Hello, Acme Systems Tech Support.... please hold. (pause) Hello, this is Timmy, may I help you?
I just got a new Luxos Linux IV server and there is a hardware problem with it.
What kind of hardware problem?
It doesn't work.
Well... let's see... Is there anything on your screen?
I'm not sure. I can't install my Mandrake.
Sir, we don't support Mandrake.
Yes, I know. But I've got a hardware failure. The computer isn't working.
(sigh) Well... do any of the lights come on when you push the 'on' button?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Is the machine plugged in, sir?
Yes, I'm not stupid you know!
OK, then. Does the system POST?
What's that?
Hmm... Well, do you get anything at all on your screen? Does the little counter count the memory?
I don't see anything
(sigh) OK, then. You'll have to send it back...
etc. etc. etc.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
This is how I would rate experiences with them:
- Linux Hardware Solutions: totally didn't have their act together, one guy was trying to sell them, build them and do tech support it seems. Good thing they got bought.
- Dell: Dell still has a long way to go learning to do Linux. Other than the Dell desktop background, they do very little to tweek the distro from what I have seen. They are trying to sell to a NT crowd, but mess up. For example, when you order a Dell with a tape drive, they don't have enough sense to include BRU or something, or even make sure there is a device in
/dev for it. New users are stumped by this. Granted, of them all, Dells are built the best. Rare to get a DOA Dell, and when you do, you can ship it back and get a new one fairly easily. Average time for a new system: one month.
- VALinux: Is the biggest of the linux only group. Their manuals are nicer and more refined, as are their servers. You will get DOA equipment from them like 1 times out of 10. They are pretty good at replacing, but this can vary. As can how long it takes to build them. I have gotten a VA in 1 day (they keep some in stock pre-fab) and I have had one take 2 months. Average is 1-2 weeks. Their SECOND tier tech support is pretty good. They also provide nifty things like the vacuum program to remote admin via serial. Better to stick with their distro unless you know what you are doing, and the poster CLEARLY has no clue if they are installing mandrake on a server. I always install Debian on them with no problem, except for RAID cards, which is getting better.
- Penguin is smaller than VA, and their systems/tech support are about the same. The advantage to them is they are 3 floors up from me, and the DOA system I got from them, I just hauled it upstairs, but did take 2 weeks to get a new one (granted, they just changed their tracking system and things were a mess.) Build times are from 1 week to 3 weeks. They have less "gurus" than VA but do good testing. They are cheaper than VA.
- Cheapy guy that makes Yahoo's boxes. These are 1/2 the price of the others. Dont expect ANY tech support if you go this route, you are on your own. Almost 1/2 of these had problems. Yeah they are cheap, but is it worth your time?...
Things to consider with ANY hardware manufacturer: You are dealing with cheap (yes, $12,000 is CHEAP for a server) systems here. Margins are razor thin. No one has the bucks to blow on stupendous tech support, NO ONE. If you want tech support that will WOW! you and systems that are almost NEVER DOA, you get a Sun, period. Quite frankly, if that is the level of support you want, you PAY for it, and pay dearly. Instead of $12,000 for a cheapie Intel box, expect to pay $50,000 for a Sun. Is it worth 5X? Well, the quality is there, and yes they are paying you a premium for a premium product. Just like the profit margin on a top of line BMW is much higher than an escort. If you buy an Intel box as a server, you are getting an Escort, expect the same level of quality.So, when it comes to buying Intel Linux boxes, I guess what I am saying is that they are OK, but don't EVER expect to be WOWed by tech support. If you are serious and have a good admin, you will be OK. Obviously yall DONT have a good admin (eg, the mandrake thing) and are paying the price. It doesn't pay to be cheap. Go get some one that knows what they are doing, you can't expect the tech guys at a manufacturer to be your admin for you and answer all your questions and hold your hand. The $500 they made on that $12,000 system gets eaten REAL quick paying some one $30 an hour to sit on the phone and guide you through the pretty mandrake install.
Buddy, I've built myself and supervised building and repairing PCs, MACs, DECs, SUNs for almost a decade, using as well crappy components, first hand components, and mixtures of them. What you say here looks like an incompetent technical department, and not stupid support people.
I've never seen such coincidence where such a large number of hardware components fail in the same computer. Not even half. And not even in the late 90s Macintoshes. Boy, they must be really incompetent. Ground them up!
To be truthful, from the way that this was posted, it does look this way. In the real world (Read: not what Slashdot posted), I posted a larger article than this. It was about 1.5 pages in total. Where the rest of that text went I'll never know. If you read my follow up you'll see the whole of the information, and if you read VA's post, you'll seen the same story. Deven Phillips, CISSP Network Architect Viata Online, Inc.
Deven Phillips, CISSP
Network Architect
Viata Online, Inc.
Wherever you go, there I am...
"Never to be daunted, (Read: we went ahead and did it anyway, without 'em!) we ordered the servers, and installed Mandrake ourselves. One of the servers (our file server to be) wouldn't load, wouldn't boot, and wouldn't even give us a good error indication.
What? You bought their boxen, with what? No OS? Or you wiped what they had put on? And then you tried to install something that they didn't sell and didn't support, and you couldn't even get the box to boot? Or give -- what? -- a meaningful POST beep code?
I'm not buying this.
Do you guys have any idea what you're doing?
"This is exactly why we chose VA, customer support. We returned the server and requested an immediate replacement."
Customer support for what? To train you in building boxes, and to train you to put on a distro they don't even sell?
And all of this is VA's fault?
Last time I heard, VA was a systems shop, not a tech school.
Completly aside from the other posts here about more plausible [bad] experiences with VA and their stuff, it sounds to me like you guys just need to take Computer Building 101.
And I think this article makes you guys (viata.com? - "e-commerce solutions for internet travel transactions! TravelCentric software and portal sites" hmmm..) look kinda dumb...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Yahoo! does NOT buy boxes "from some guy who sells them really cheap". I know, because I work for the vendor that sells servers to Yahoo!. Think about it - Yahoo! buys servers from "some guy"... yeah, sure they do... Don
Even casual involvement excludes total freedom by it's inherent nature. John Valby
Oh, so DiBona is the last name of Chris. I saw his email address and was wondering why someone from VA was not using a VA address. Apparently it was merely he was putting his personal address on the postings.
Can you say "FRAGMENTATION"? Where is the Linux Standard Project.. things are getting hairy.
Mr. Poag- Actually I've been using your work on my desktops since I started using linux a short two years ago. One of the nice grey "Etrade sucks" variants is the wallpaper for my machines under every OS. In fact, I think I was taught the tar command with one of your files as an example. I'm sorry to hear you had such an unpleasant experience with VA. Thanks for the explanation.
-jpowers
-jpowers
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
I originally posted this article with a large amount of additional information. The complete story is as follows. The server VA Linux FullOn 2x2 Dual 700MHz PIII Mylex AcceleRAID 150 4 10000RPM SCSI Drives Intel 440GX+ Mother Board Dual Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 NICs The Operating System Linux Mandrake 7.0 and 7.1 (Both Tried) ReiserFS andf ext2 (Both Tried) The first time we recieved the server, it ran the installed Red Hat distro, but due to security concerns and performance issues, we wanted to run Mandrake (Optimized for Pentium processors). The installation went without a hitch every time. After rebooting, the server would have a VFS unable to mount root filesystem, or a kernel oops (aternately). After taking with VA tech support, we reinstalled Their RedHat distro, and had the same results. At their recommendation, I rebuilt the RAID array configuration and reinstalled. During the format of the RAID array one of the drive failure lights began blinking. I shut down the server, reseated the drive, and began the format again. This time two drives failed. I sent the server back to VA, and after two weeks it was returned to me. When I turned the machine on, there was no OS installed, period. Second, many of the parts we had returned we not returned to us (i.e. the rails, power cord, manuals, faceplate). Again we requested an RMA on the server. The replacement of the server this time took a total of 4 weeks. For an Internet company, that is an eternity when your are trying to beat your competitors to market. I was told many times that the server was being built, and that they had had a bad batch of RAM or a failed burn in. Eventually though, the new server arrived, and this one has worked (Running Mandrake 7.1) since the day after it got here. VA has offered us on site support, and 3 years parts replacement to attempt to make up for the errors that occured. Although I do not entirely blame the team at VA, I do feel that customer support has been degraded greatly, by MANY companies, and not only VA. We have had similar problems with at least 10 vendors. This port was not directed entirely at VA, although theirs was the worst example we have had.
Deven Phillips, CISSP
Network Architect
Viata Online, Inc.
Wherever you go, there I am...
Fortunately that is not the case here. :-)
Many of our tech support staff have moved to other
areas of the company over the years.
New positions range from webmasters to software
engineering and professional services.
Keep people motivated and moving forward and they're
more likely to be productive.
--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
at least VA's machines are well priced. perhaps they should license some of apple's gorgeous industrial design, start charging more money and have support as crappy as apples.
If you want support get a Dell, IBM or Sun computer
But then you can't pay trained monkeys $9-12 an hour to do that can you?
Is it plugged in sir ?
Yes.
*Mute button* Oh shit!
Wait a sec let me read about what's going on here, do you mind if I put you on hold?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Well it looks as though the /. crew still has content control even though VA owns em, good for you! :)
:)
I'm kinda conserned about this. A couple business partners and I are considering selling our software system solutions on a VA servers: We provide our custom software systems et al. and VA provides the hardware and support for the Boxes so we don't have to run around fixing broken ethernet cards... just our software
But I am still considering VA for this choice. I've met Jason and Zack from VA Canada and from what I gather Zack's job is to, "Make sure our boxes work for our customers". (sorry If I got that wrong Zack). Now with a job description like that I've got to wonder if this is an exception to what's actually going on over at VA.
Any other VA customers out there like to comment??
Now I havn't done a lot of homework but don't VA boxes come Redhat with VA Enhancements pre-installed on them. Then the obvious question here is why would you yank out something that the VA developers have slaved over to make run very well on very good hardware and put in Mandrake on them... there servers right, why not just "enhance" what's allready on them to suit your purposes???
At my company we purchased SGI 1200s. SGI 1200s are just VA Linux boxes repackaged. SGI provides better and further-reaching support than VA does from my experiences.
who knows what the exact problem is with integrators and why equipment and services seem to be mismatched, but very rarely have we purchased equipment for use in a production environment without some type of glitch. while i agree with you that equipment purchased, no matter what quantity or price, should be delivered: on time, in working order, and complete, i would also expect that anything we're bringing in fresh will also have to be: tested, reconfigured for our environment, and retested again. i'm not talking just single server type configs either. i'm talking about $150k installs. where engineers come to your location and "build" the config onsite. and stuff still goes wrong... cause it equipment is made 100% correct before delivery, it either won't deliver, or there wouldn't be a need to upgrade.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Maybe the reason VA Linux has a policy against installing Mandrake is because they know it lacks the support for their hardware...
Seriously, you aren't asking netscape to provide support for windows either.I'm sure people call them all the time, wondering why their modem isn't working ("because I need the modem to use Netscape, it must be Netscape's responsibility") or many other Windows-related problems that the inept may assume are an application's fault. Hey, if you're charging for tech support on a per-incident basis, Windows-related problems must be a gravy train for Netscape's tech support revenues.
<grin>
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The did not want to install it so why should they support it? Refer the Mandrake instead and ask them if the can help with the driver issues on that particular hardware setup.
Seriously, you aren't asking netscape to provide support for windows either.
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
How about Penguin Computing? They seem to offer the equivalent in the rackmount dept., and have similar pricing. What experiences have people had with their stuff?
My company (on second thought, i'll leave it nameless, this got more ranty than i thought it would) ordered the NAS (network attached storage) device from va, along with four fullOns for internal usage. The first one we got was messed up, the card on the backplane had gone loose during shipping. Making for a disturbing 'OS Not Found' during boot. We got them to send us a new one with a little bit of bitching.
As it turns out the second one had the same loose part (perhaps they could hold it in with some styrofoam or cardboard) but once we connected it it worked perfectly.
Personally, you definitely don't want to put Mandrake or anything else on the NAS, simply because VA has put on this really great (GPL'd) web admin front end on it that simplifies everything, from samba permissions/quotas to backups. On the other fullOns, we were even throwing around the idea of putting FreeBSD on one of them... but heck, that's your choice, but you paid for VA's special RH 6.2(.1) ...
Overall I have been pleased with VA, mainly because of the mousepads they sent, and the cool blue leds, and the funny little plastic keys. At least their equipment fits in a standard hubbel rack, versus Dell (GWBush loving freakazoid company) stuff which requires adapters and other stuff (which dell still hasn't sent)...
So you get burned by VA... at least your pocketbook isn't empty (you know you specced the same system with sun and dell and got figures roughly 3x and 2x respectively). I think you get burned with whoever you go with, but at least you have someone to call at VA... but who knows, maybe they shipped you the NAS that we sent back!
It was a little freaky that the NAS docs said very clearly BETA on them, but hey, that's the way i like it.
Enough rant, buy what you like from who you like, but don't complain just because they won't undo all of the value adding that they do just for you.
Against my advice, my management and the usurping geeks in my office decided to purchase TurboCluster server.
My company has an unnatural and incestuous addiction to Compaq hardware, and it is frightfully important that the distribution support the Compaq SMART Raid controller. Red Hat supports the controller very well (not that Red Hat has seen a dime from these cheapskates).
Well, TurboCluster arrived and barfed on the controllers, despite the fact that the salesperson had assured us that the hardware was supported. My genius coworkers disabled the SMART controllers and installed Adaptec (worst controller on the market). Shortly after that news broke that TurboLinux fired half their staff.
These people still won't admit that I was right, and that the cluster market for Linux remains premature.
Pride is the first of the seven deadly sins. My boss probably thinks TurboLinux is the second.
Sure, that's absolutely great if you're building a Hewlett-Packard Pavillion that you're going to sell in quantity through all the Fry's and Circuit Citys.
But, let's face it, how many of these servers is VA Linux really going to sell? A couple of hundred before they make a change that makes the video obsolete?
When you then divide the production costs of the video by the total number of machines you expect to sell to which the video will apply, what are the final costs per machine? How practical is this? Not very, is my guess.
How are you going to distribute this? VHS videocassette? That's expensive. A CD is a lot cheaper, especially if your computer is going to have a CD-ROM drive.
But how is the video going to help those really basic users who don't even know how to plug the monitor into the video card, let alone start up the machine, toss in a CD-ROM and let Windows autorun it?
How long will more advanced users stick with the video, if it starts out explaining to beginners that the CD-ROM drive is not a cupholder?
This is a problem that lacks an easy solution.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I have only this to say: VA Linux has given far more to the Linux community than they have taken away. Everyone goes through transition periods, and we all must stand behind them. Even as we all must transition from one point in evolution to another, we must stand behind one another. We are a community of creativity, genius, innovation, and harmony. We must understand that the guys at VA love Linux, and they stay up in the wee hours of the night, just as we do to make Linux better, and to give back to the community. We must stand behind them.
Pain is temporary. Glory is forever.
Remember, way back when, the simple complexity (!) of computers was enough to keep the idiots at bay. Hell, most of 'em couldn't even turn the damned things on.
Today, sadly, that has changed. The death of computing as being synonymous with intelligence is upon us.
<BigBlockMopar starts playing an MP3 of Taps.>
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Hey, no problem. Thanks for being polite by asking me to clarify it, by the way. Alot of people never bother.
:)
And thanks for using my stuff, too, by the way
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
You are full of crap!
...
..." ha, ha, ha, it just sounds pathetic.
... Hint (In case you do it): think about an SS5 power supply for the solution.
_ _________
What is wrong with using Mandrake? It is the best distro, period. It makes no difference it is a server!
Mandrake (specially bleading edge cooker) always has the lastest apache packages with all kind of performance and bug fixes already applied. Debian is good and all, but you always end up using tarballs to get what you want
Are you sure you know what you are talking about?
"The guy that sell Yahoo
The only true thing you said is that Sun makes **reliable** hardware; but not necessarily trouble free: go issue a power off command on the prom of an Ultra150 and you will see what I mean
And yes, I consider myself an acomplished (or for you, excellent) Systems Engineer. I have worked with in and out with my share of Origins, Ultra Enterprise, HPs, you name it; and when it comes to cheap-r-us Linux servers, it is *custom built* with a stable Mandrake Cooker snapshot on top.
___________________________________________
"Who's bullshitting who" indeed....
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
On a monday night, I accidentally spilled a glass of ovaltine on the table next to my brand new Thinkpad..unfortunately, I managed to splash some of it up onto the keyboard down by the arrow keys. I did my best to dry it out, to no avail -- within an hour or so, the keyboard had completely died, rendering my poor little Thinkpad dead in the water.
I contacted IBM.
The service rep I talked to at IBM said there would be an Airborne Express shipment box on my doorstep by the time I wake up the following morning. Fantastic, I said, since I didn't have to pay a cent to either ship it, or pay for the repairs, since it was covered under my warranty. Sure enough, the shipment box arrived here in Tucson. Inside were very clear instructions regarding how to pack it up, and how to leave any last-minute notes for the service crew. Within 5 minutes, I was packed up and ready to go, and subsequently dropped off the package on its way back to Milpitas, CA.
About an hour later I realized I accidentally left a James Brown CD in my thinkpad, along with my 10/100 netcard. Oh well, no problem. I'll just wait.
A day goes by. I'm able to track the package via Airborne Express' webpage, which was nice. I managed to survive tuesday without my Thinkpad.
Wednesday night, a get a knock on my door at 5 in the afternoon -- Its Airborne Express with a package from IBM -- Its my Thinkpad, all fixed, complete with my 10/100 NIC and my James Brown CD taped to the hood. Within the course of less 72 hours, IBM got a package to my doorstep, got my Thinkpad to a service center, diagnosed the problem, fixed it, and sent my Thinkpad back to me. For free.
THAT is service.
You basically get what you pay for. If youre going to buy mission-critical servers from an unreputable little chop shop on the virge of bankruptcy like VA, you should expect to get the run-around. All any company like VA does is take off-the-shelf OEM parts, slap a machine together, and glue a little plastic logo on the front of the case. Youre not getting anything you couldn't otherwise assemble on your own, or obtain from a larger LInux systems vendor such as IBM, Dell, and others.
You're right. I dont like VA. I've got plenty of reasons why, too. I'm just glad other people are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee when it comes to this company..I worked with their people on a volunteer basis for nearly two years, I know exactly what sort of work-ethic they have..or lack, more specifically. Hell, go on EFnet and look in #linuxwarez. Most of the damn channel ops are VA employees, busy warezing on VA's own lines. Go look for yourself.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
My friends and I were talking about this the other day. If you're a competent user that is experiencing very bizarre problems, and you have to be the one to call into tech support, chances are you're going to connect with somebody who knows considerably less about the system than you do.
Our solution: provide a privatized testing service that can rank you as being either a moron (first level tech support) or and experienced person (second or higher level tech support). That way when you call up you can just tell the first tier tech support schmoe that you want to talk to somebody more knowledgable, and give them your tech-support-receiving rank.
(I guess this is sort of like the "stupid" stickers that comedian wanted dumb people to be forced to wear...)
Besides, I'm sure that if your techs find that a system has any software installed which they can't support -- they'll just remove and set aside those disk drives, plug in your VA standard disk drives, and go on their merry way fixing all the non-disk problems. The last step would be to replace the customer disk drives and test that those drives are working at the hardware level.
At my last job, we ordered 2 Penguins, and an affiliated company bought I don't know how many more (somewhere around 5-10?). With every single one, we had to take the system apart and make sure PCI cards were snug before the thing would boot. A PCI card occasionally coming loose is to be expected; but, come on, we're talking about every single computer we got from them.
Also with one of them, we had a problem connecting an external Ultra (Ultra2? I can't remember now) drive, because, as it turned out, the external SCSI connector was attached to the motherboard via a 1 meter (and change) cable that did nothing but connect to the backplane. (note, of course, that no more than 1.5m of SCSI cable was supported by that particular version of SCSI, so our use of a short, slightly-over-.5m external cable was screwing us) Repeated calls to Penguin CS gave us no clue that they were, essentially, putting their machines together wrong (since there was already an internal Ultra2 connector, the extra .75m or so of unneeded cable served no purpose).
I wouldn't be surprised if they were simply using the cables supplied by their motherboard manufacturer, who didn't know what would be where SCSI-wise; that's the sort of mistake I'd make. But if I'm paying someone to build a machine for me, I expect it's because I'd rather depend upon their superior knowledge and experience wrt PC-building -- i.e., if they're just going to do what I'd do, and make the mistakes I'd make, why buy from them?
You'd probably have to kill me to get me to buy a VA box for personal use -- I've moved away from PeeCees as much as possible, and I prefer to pick the exact components I want myself -- but you'll see me shove a pitchfork through my nose before I buy, or recommend someone else buy, a Penguin machine.
--Matthew
Ah ha ha! You posted this knowing full well that it would be moderated funny, discrediting the truth behind VA owning Malda! You are using reverse-reverse-psychology! You're probably invested in Andover and use Microsoft Windows and hate Linux to boot! The truth is out there! Aliens are posting on slashdot! New coke was a government mind contol test!
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The biggest server advantage would be the inclusion of ReiserFS. Second to that would be the pentium optimizations for all binaries.
I am a Red Hat fanatic, but these are powerful reasons to think of Mandrake for a server. They should not be discounted in such a cavilier manner.
He is having a HARDWARE problem. He sent it back and when returned, part of the server was missing and it was still broke.
Sheese.....This has nothing to do with the distro.
Moron.
These people refer to me by name when I deal with them, are extremely forthcoming about errors/ommissions on their part, and whenever I have needed repair work done, it has been done for free while I wait.
They will install my choice of OS, and they are one of the few vendors who know that things like FreeBSD exist and what compatibility issues exist.
The PC was bought in 98 and they still support it with a smile - no questions asked, and no warranty expiration interrogation.
I am not mentioning this company as an endorsement, but as an example of what people look for in service and support (and friendliness).
I wish VA luck, but for my dollar, I'm continuing to go with family operations like Infoquest.
You know, just after I clicked submit on that last post, I thought of something about Microsoft's tech support.
I've watched users pull out their per-minute M$ tech support 1-900 phone numbers, and be prompted over the phone to make all sorts of system settings changes. Which, as anyone who has ever touched a Windows box knows, will require a reboot.
Perhaps the reason that Windows doesn't let you restart processes without having to reboot the computer is so that M$ can force tech support customers to stay on the phone longer, thus generating more revenues?
Think about it. If the average Windows 9x/ME box takes 3 minutes to reboot and in the course of a tech support call has to be rebooted 3 times (probably not far off), that's nine more billable minutes. How much is a billable minute? How many Windows users call M$'s tech support?
Scary. I'd never thought of that before...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Remember that today's computer companies often make tiny margins on their sales.
Remember also that computers are complicated things, regardless of the operating system being used. Users will always call up with stupid, basic questions, wasting the tech support time (and therefore budgets).
In a stint where I did a lot of help desk tech support, I'd often get stupid questions about why is the monitor still black (turn it on), why doesn't the RAM I bought fit into the computer (I later found out the guy was trying to stuff it into the floppy disk drive but that thought *never* crossed my mind when I was on the phone with him, killing an hour of phone time), your computer must be broken because I can't get Yahoo to work (Failed to Connect error - the guy didn't even have a modem, let alone an internet account anywhere). Granted, with a rack-mounted Linux server, the questions will be a lot less basic, but still equally stupid to anyone really familiar with Linux. These will *hog* tech support time and dollars.
Customer service has had to become a thing of the past, unless you're willing to call the helpful 1-900 number or fork out your Visa on a per-incident basis.
That's the way it is and will be for the forseeable future. Unless you're in women's fashions, where the markup is often well over 100% and the number of possible tech support questions related to the newly redesigned belt buckle and zipper are limited.
It's simply not built into the cost of the sale anymore. It's a good thing, too - if it were, an el-cheapo Celeron could run way over $3,000.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The purpose of Linux, besides its source and maintenance model, is to allow for extreame configurability right down to the code. This means that you can go your own way. I going your own way, you've left everyone else behind; can you really expect them to help you out? You've decieded to rely on your own knowledge and understanding of the problem once you start running linux "the way you like it."
Now a hardware provider is not just responsible for choices in their hardware, but also for choices in their software that supports that hardware. If you felt you needed to trust someone for this, you should have stuck to the decisions they made for you.
Now as far as missing parts goes, well that's bad. My theory is that the parts missing were not propperly supported by the software choices you made, and that the system was, as best as possible, configured to run with this choice, which VA makes no claim to have full understanding of. You wanted mandrake, you got mandrake, and although VA doesn't support madrake, they tried, and it seems failed. Possibly running Mandrake with the parts that VA uses is mostly impossible.
-Daniel
We have several VA boxes here, and paid extra for "enhanced support" ( one of the joys of working for a very large multi-national corporation - they buy enhanced support for EVERYTHING ). When we had problems using VA supplied gigabit ethernet cards, VA sent two people out here for a couple of days to help us and we did eventually fix the problem.
My perception of VA's linux system support is that they provide a reasonably recent distribution with additional drivers for any uncommon hardware that they provide ( we have a Mylex extreme raid controller ). I think ( and have suggested to them ) that they should provide regular system updates - sending out new CDs with the latest kernels and patches. They could send the cds out quarterly perhaps even with a special update when a new version of whatever distribution ( we got redhat from them ) is released. A newsletter would also be a good idea. They need to go beyond having just good solid products and work on evangalisim, and going the extra mile in customer service is one way to do it. VA systems do cost more than some other companies for the same motherboard / cpu speed / memory configuration. I like their chassis better than the cheaper ones ( Boombox for example has very poor cooling design ). changing from "yes we have customer service " to " customer service is our most important product " would help VA. Many of the things they do - for example employing and supporting the development projects of some of the leaders in linux GUI software, as well as other significant contributors to linux are good things for a company to do. They help the whole linux community, but are probably not recognized by the majority of VA's customers. Having that extra mile customer service would be recognized.
enough is too much
What crack are you smoking? I feel no pity for someone that is trying to run Mandrake on a server. PLEASE! Go figure that a OS designed mainly for desktops has problems being a server. Try debian!
What we really need is a company that hires a group of geeks with diverse experience, and who are willing to learn new stuff at customer request. Have the customer pay by the man hour above a certain yearly amount pre-included in their plan, and have all your geeks watch some central job dispach system and take jobs that they are interrested in, or that land in their area of knowledge.
Those companies already exist and their employees are called consultants.. The only problem is, they suck just as much, but cost more. "But a good company can make a name." you say. Well, that is true, but unfortunately PHB's don't hire *good* companies, they hire *big* companies.. and by the time a good one gets big, they've lost all their fizzle and are filled with second-rate employees..
While many distro's make life easier in some ways, Linux is just plain hard. It's a labor of love - if you want it bad enough you'll deal with it... if you don't, what's so wrong with running 9x? You aren't at that point of inflection, maybe. And that's cool, Linux isn't for everyone. However, this discussion is about tech support from big vendors, you can post questions on at the linuxgazette and get answers.
Logistics may be the culprit here - based on your location. My folks live in Australia, and it took them 6 weeks to buy a mattress (had to be ordered from the factory), the stores close on saturday (even grocery stores). It sounds like IBM dropped the ball, but quality support is going to be sparse in a sparse location. Here in LA, they drive my parts to me, but it's a half hour drive.
Wrong. I have pdf reference docs on specific Netserver configuration parameters for Linux. Install docs for Linux. They don't pre-install it, but they do give you a combo that's known to work, and you don't buy an NT license by default. They also support hardware questions for Linux installs (NetRaid, NIC, etc.). Check out the OS tables for the Netserver line a little harder, you'll see it.
Why is this question a "Is there better support than company A?" instead of "What good forms of support are there?"
Mentioning companies is bad form.
By your post, those that have never used company A now will think worse about them. You could of had an isolated incident. A new person working support. Who knows...
With that being said, I have had good experiences with VA. Parts always arrive. We did have problems getting the right rails for one of the boxes but everything else was handeled well.
Our local support has spent many hours helping install and configure software. I now have my VA render farm to where all I do is add a machine, throw in a CD and 20 minutes later, I have a new render node.
They have been more than I could have hoped for.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Well, let's see, they told you that they can't support Mandrake for you (which is a silly option for a server IMHO) and they delivered what you knew already -- No Support for something they weren't ready to support.
Look, there are 2 billion Linux Distributions, they cannot possibly support everything.
/Simon
This certainly seems to be the case with vendors, which is why we try not to be one. When we sell new hardware to someone, we itemize the warranty/support info on the invoices and quotes. Basically they get 90 days support on our labour of assembly, and we sell everything as installed on their network, but beyond that we do a hard sell: either buy a service contract, or pay hourly at our standard rates if we have to come out there.
I blame the big OEMs (cough, IBM, Gateway, Compaq) for tricking people (lusers) into thinking that anything you buy comes with a lifetime of really crappy tech support..
Anyway
-adric at ccactus dot com, consulting in the 404 and beyond
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
Malda suppresses anti-VA stories because he's owned by them!!!!!!!!!
Oh, wait a second....revise that conspiracy theory a little bit for extra paranoia...
Malda is only posting this story to lull us into a false sense of saftey with him! He's throwing us this little scrap of a "VA sucks" post on slashdot to make us THINK that he's not owned by VA, but in reality, you know he really is. You can just wait for the other shoe to drop!
Does that about cover the bases here? Or is there some extra piece of paranoia I'm missing out on?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
At the company I previously worked for I was told to handle the ordering servers for a linux platform. On a daily basis I dealt with Dell, IBM, Compaq, and VA Linux. After all the drawbacks to each company I decided to go with VA as a hardware provider. My sales rep was awesome never missed appointments and always followed up. They seemed to bend over backwards for most of our needs or worked with us for a comprimise. But my best experience was with thier professional services dept. After dealing with the other major hardware vendors and independent services like Redhat and Linuxcare, VA was the most knowledgable and proffesional. As far as the Mandrake install if VA was to build all distros custom to their hardware (as they do with redhat) then that server would probably cost you alot more. Plus my feeling is that if you want Mandrake then install it yourself and as far as support for it then that should be part of the decision of putting mandrake on your systems. Dont blame others because you want to use something beyond thier scope of support. I am not going to suck VA's dick here though. After contacting their tech support (1st level) I was left with a sour taste in my mouth, but after talking to a higher level tech I was satisfied. So make whatever decision as far as hardwarethat you need mine will be with someone that supports and contributes the community and does not ride the coat tails of linux like Dell and IBM.
Do you really believe this? You ought to become a lawyer with the way you deal in "facts."
I purchased a car that they said would work great with the 91+ Octane gasoline. I didn't like that octane gasoline, so I put jet fuel in the car. Now the car won't work and after I sent it to the shop, it's back with parts missing. What is wrong with ?!?! What ever happened to service?
Moral of the story? None really. Just be glad it's VA and not IBM. IBM would have just told you to stick the server up your butt after hearing you installed Mandrake.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
apparently the lameness filter requires you to type some text here.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Try Telenet, recently acquired by Walnut Creek/BSDi. They make good boxes, and Roger from their support team is quite sharp. They're still quite agnostic about what you put on their boxes, despite being owned by BSDi now. They're willing to preload a wide variety of x86 Unixen, including Solaris x86, several flavors of Linux, and of course some BSDs.
Anyway, for support for Unix on x86, I'd say Telenet is the best place I've encountered so far. Much better than Penguin, and not overpriced like VA. And of course, they're far more flexible about what you do, and far more willing to support you if you decide to do something different. Heck, maybe they'd even support you if you loaded Windows ;>
Dell, VALinux and others suffer from being overconfident. They have it made: they have a large customer base (Dell) and / or a trendy name (vaLINUX). Dell, at least, started out with good service, good prices, and a decent product. That's how they've done so well.
I've bought hundreds of computers for a development house that relies almost exclusively on Linux. I order computers with all the best: Asus MBs, Seagate HDs, G400 vid, SBLive audio, etc. AS WELL AS MY CHOICE OF LINUX. The company we use is a smaller local vendor (check out www.buypogo.com) that is willing to build computers to specifications WE dictate, get them to us within a week, usually, and has the best customer service I've ever seen. (They usually come the next day to fix things.) They give a 2 yr. warranty on everything, and replace parts and whole machines without question.
The folks at Buypogo realize that we're competent and they will actually save money by not going the "Are you sure it's broken?" route. We have a few old Dells sitting around; the last time one of them broke (an obvious hard drive failure) I called them for a replacement. The technician requested that I open up the box and look at the hard drive: the only way I got him to agree to send me a new one was by opening up the box and saying "Oh yeah, it looks really broken!"
Go for the little guy, they actually have something to gain by providing you with good support.
I am left wondering how bad is the QC over at VA that a box is allowed to leave without parts.
...
... and then does not do a second inspection of all parts before delivery.
This industry is like that everywhere. People screw up. It is a fact of life. Better get used to it.
Where I work, within the past seven working days alone, we have received from our supplier:
- A RAID server with no RAID controller
- A rack-mount KVM with no V (no display)
We also recieved a RAID server that looked like it had been run over by a truck. Crumpled case and shattered parts. Why the shipper even thought they could pass it off as okay is beyond me...
Especially more so considering the grief this customer has already been through.
Your average company uses the same production pipeline for RMA that they do for everything else. I'm sure it was just pure bad luck that this guy got nailed this way, but the law of averages says this will happen on occasion.
What I would expect is some kind of compensation from VA (a partial refund or credit, for example) for all the trouble.
I would have some reservation about a company that does not contact a customer regarding a delay in processing
Again, this is completely normal. Nobody admits to their delays unless you ask them about it. Is it right? No. Does it happen anyway? Yup.
What if the error was made when the order was being keyed into the order system? That's how that RAID server I mentioned slipped through the supplier -- what they built and QC passed matched the order sheet perfectly. It just wasn't the order we faxed to them.
That's really to say nothing of the fact it took an "Ask Slashdot" story to get something done.
Of course, according to the poster claiming to be the VA Manager, the problem has been fixed and did not need an "Ask Slashdot" story to get something done.
I'm not so much defending VA here as pointing out that they seem to be operating in the same form as the rest of the industry.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The end result, the tech support people who know their stuff and have gumption do their best to get into a development position. The lifers who are hanging on until they can retire and have no idea what fsck does (and I'm talking Solaris support here) stay on the hotline.
:-)
Fortunately that is not the case here.
Many of our tech support staff have moved to other
areas of the company over the years.
That was one of the points I was making. The best, most competent people in tech support leave. There is no incentive for a very good tech support person to stay in tech support, they don't get credit, accolades or cash.
When I left my tech support position for a position in engineering, my salary really jumped. In my old division, the people making the big bucks were the sales people, not the technically savvy ones.
George
VA Linux is notorious for only supporting/Installing Red Hat,
so is Penguin Computing, but at least Penguin offers AMD systems.
This is strange coming from a company who is sponsoring the Retail Debian project (VA Linux).
I've had dealings with a company in Illinois, who installs and supports almost every commercial distribution,
plus Slack (My Fav) and Debian.
The sales guys know their stuff, and they also sell a kick-ass Linux Gaming System, (apparently it's their best selling model)
You can find these guys at www.qlitech.net
"Then it comes to be,
that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel,
is just a frieght train coming your way..... "
"Fortune, Fame, Mirror Vain, Gone Insane..... But The Memory Remains...
/* RANT */
Why does slashdot insist on putting the default to Submit instead of Preview ?
/* RANT */
I'm currently in the process of purchasing a cluster from VA Linux, and seeing this does not re-assures me at all.
I've been getting great response from my appointed sales person, (Thanks Jason), and over the years, I've learned to not take everything a sales person tells you for granted. They have a product to sell, and they usually will do anything it takes.
Surprisingly enough, Jason gave me the bare technical on what I asked for, and did not try to b.s. me into buying something I did not need. We wanted to buy a couple of extra 1U unit for NT servers, and he recommended against it (at the cost of a sale) because he could not guarantee excellent operation.
Now, this is something I respect. Also, when pricing my babies, I had a 24/7 phone support and next day on-site service contract added at very minimal costs. This is a clever (if not essential) thing to do when you plan on running enterprise application on servers. If one of my admin would not get a contract on ANY hardware we purchase here, I'd most likely have to get him out the door and beat him silly. You can NOT live in a production environment without either spare hardware or a decent service contract. (My SUN's all have 24/7 2 hours response time HARD and SOFT support).
With what I'm projecting for my to be bought cluster, I cannot afford extensive downtime. This is why I chose VA. I want a platform that will work out of the box, and not require me to tweak, tune, re-install everything. They ship me a dual-cpu / raid / whatever's in the box customized kernel, and they will support that. I praise them for it. And if the hardware is half a good as the pre-sale service I've been getting, well, I'm in heaven.
Please stop kneecapping companies because you chose to totally ignore their warnings, and fucked up on your own. And please hit yourself over the head with a sharp object for not ordering a decent support contract along with your server.
(My employer does not speak for me, I dont speak for them. It's kind of a deal we have in here.)
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
You've leaving out enough detail that it makes me wonder whether you actually know what's wrong with the computer.
Obviously VA won't support your installation of Mandrake. They will likely support the hardware (1 year warranty is normal, with support contracts extending it) and the pre-installed software.
If you want to get some real support from them, put their version of redhat back on and prove that it doesn't work. Telling them "I installed another OS and it doesn't work..." makes you a candidate for the USER=ID10T registry entry. If you must, install win98 on it and tell them exactly which hardware doesn't work. If you discover that win98 runs on the system just fine, and all the parts work, then VA delivered exactly what you paid for, and they are under no obligation to provide support for your non-standard use of their product.
Of course, it could be that you've done enough troubleshooting to indicate exactly what's wrong with the server, and shown VA that it is their problem. If so, then you certianly have a right to get VA to fix it. (but you should have given us a better proof that VA actually did something wrong here...)
-Adam
"I must know what you do to write about women and their feelings so well?"
"It's easy. I think of a man, and take away reason and accountability."
As good as it gets (movie)
Sorry about the bold, forgot to unbold. My bad, I wasn't trying to be snippy.
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Guess what? The (major accounts) sales guy missed appointments, never followed up, and in general, sent red alerts all over the place: if pre-sales was this bad, imagine how bad they would be after they got our money.
Even without reading this story, I was never going to buy from them, this is the final nail in the coffin.
Wake up, VA. Treating customers bad is a sure way to oblivion.
I've been amazed by how little Linux companies seem to care about trying to do any pre-sales work with a customer.
Gateway, Alcatel, and General Meters visit our campus, meet with us to answer questions before we buy, and check in on us now and then to make sure all is well.
When I went to buy $60K on servers from VA and asked for some help on sizing the equipment, I basically was told that answers to those questions would have to go through their consulting department and would cost $$$. I bought from VA anyway, and although the machines are great, I have one that is underpowered and two that are tremendous overkill. And I've never even received a call to see if I needed anything else.
This summer, I attended SGI's Linux University, and was excited about all the things they were doing. SGI has offices in Indy, so I figured it would be easy to get them to come out and talk to the rest of the staff so we could switch from VA to SGI. After 6 calls to their offices, I could never get the Indiana rep to call or email me. So, we ended up ordering from VA again.
If those that are already "converted" have to pull teeth to get the sales people to help them, how are they ever going to sell to the "fence-sitters"?
(Slightly) off topic, but I also had a problem with VA Linux, I ordered two desktop systems that never arrived (although they were charged to my credit card two days after I placed the order).
Eventually VA refunded my money (6 weeks later) but not after multiple calls to customer service. The best part was that everyone I spoke with tried to talk me into accepting the charges and letting them ship the computers, even after I told them that I didn't need the PCs since I placed a similar order with another vendor.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
We had a need for a fairly low-end print server. Something that didn't have to have RAID or even SCSI hard drives on it. Just needs to drive a few department printers. We put together a Penguin box on their web site for about $2400 which will MORE than do the job. In fact, at that price I could have two of them with hot failover software for less money than I was seeing for the low end VA rackmounts. Oh yeah the Penguin is a 1U so I could fit two of the penguins in the space of 1 VA rackmount.
Don't forget, also, that Chris DiBona has been seen in the past on Slashdot slamming Penguin, slinging mud at Sam Ockman (president of Penguin), and in general acting very unprofessionally towards his competition. While Penguin may be in the #2 slot behind VA in terms of funding, they're #1 in terms of ethics and professional conduct in my book. I never once saw Mr. Ockman flaming VA or Mr. DiBona on /. forums.
Screw Micro$oft.
Having spent 4 1/2 years there, I know of what I speak.
You end up talking to irate people all day long, management does everything they can to keep you from leaving for a better position, and any technical smarts gets unrecognized.
Also, there is little technical career track in the tech support field.
The end result, the tech support people who know their stuff and have gumption do their best to get into a development position. The lifers who are hanging on until they can retire and have no idea what fsck does (and I'm talking Solaris support here) stay on the hotline.
I guess until customers demand better tech support, and treat their own tech support people with more respect, it's not going to get better.
George
I, too, cannot get my Mandrake or redhat or suse to work. I am retired, on a fixed income, and unable to spend $.01K on my machine. My machine is my only connection to the world now. And here I am stuck with Windows 95. Linux, to put it simply, doe not seem to be ready for the simple end users. If I am told one more time I must learn the computer langauage, I will yell from the top of my voice NO! and then ask you what part of no do you not understand, I am staying with win95 until I find some way to get linux to operate, even though my win95 is now failing, too. When it goes, this old dinosaur become extinct on the internet and with computers. It is jsut that simple for we simple end users.
Retired dinosaur, simple user, volunteer, guinea pig
Title says it all. A story like that posted on /. should get VA hopping pretty quick! Hopefully this won't taint the use of Linux at your workplace, but you never can tell these days...
Why are people buying prebuild crap from companies that treat them like crap?
Well, I don't know about anybody else, but I can talk about the company I work for.
We're a small-time integrator specializing in Linux. Even being small, we ship between two and ten servers a month. It is easier for us to pay someone else to build them for us then it is for us to build them ourselves.
And these aren't pre-built systems. They are what the industry calls "semi-custom configuration" machines. You pick a base line, and the adjust CPU, hard drives, memory and selected peripherals until you like it. We stick with brands and models with a good rep and that are known to work with Linux.
(Granted, after three problem units this week, I was heard to remark aloud, "We should just buy raw silicon and aluminum and build from there", but hey, everyone had their bad days...)
Just FYI.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"If you need support, RTFM, and roll your own." I used to feel this way when I started working for a High School that has over 500 computers. Once 5 or 6 labs, each from a different vendor for different purposes, went down, I had my hands full. With just one lab, I could leisurely fix it, but when a bunch go down, you just want the answer. You could care less how much it costs, or what you learn from it. A bit of triage, I guess. Not good, but it's what happens. "Roll your own" is an unacceptable answer for many institutions with only one or two tech guys. Chris
Seriously-
What's the story behind this sentiment? Did you have a bad experience with them or something?
-jpowers
-jpowers
Sadly this type of thing has been happening all to often recently, and not just with computers. Many companies seem to be in such a rush to push their product that they give little though to after sale support/service and don't have standard procedures for dealing with complaints. It seems that almost nothing is right the first time these days, and it often takes complaining very loudly to get anything more than a sluggish response. The customer service standards of just a few years ago seem to have been tossed out the window, and I wonder how long it will take consumers to become sick of returning merchandise due to poor quality control or any number of things.
This situation seems to apply to many goods, from smaller purchases where it might be tolerated but certainly not expected to things like cars or in this case servers. The backward steps taken in product quality would be mildly amusing if it wasn't so irritating.
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
Technically, what happened to you was credit card fraud. They charged you without sending you a product. Visa or Mastercard wil lsimply remove their vendor privileges and they won't be able to take credit card orders anymore.
No joke - this happened to me with Dell and Mastercard threatened them accordingly and it was fixed in a jiff.
They can ignore you but they won't ignore the card companies.
Dude, just get over it...seriously. The company I work for _does_ spend millions of dollars at a time, with Sun however, and we also pay for the platinum support (we're suckers that way).
Guess how good it is? It sucks. It's all crap and it sickens me. The best that Sun does for us is to bring us the parts. I've even tried to convince management that we don't need support, spend the money on spare parts and we'll do it ourself.
A note to anyone reading, stop paying for that support, get a decent admin, and pay a couple of bucks for the spare parts. You'll save tens of thousands of dollars, and a lot of your time. And then there's the infamous "well have you applied all of the latest patches sir?". What a waste of flesh.
You worked for an ISP that bought many boxes. Probably spent a large sum of money. VA wanted to keep you happy so they could sell more boxes. Like that is a surprise. I wonder if they would have answered your questions, if you were just an individual not working for an ISP.
You suggestion that the disto is what broke the hardware is silly.
Have you looked at PostgreSQL?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
On two separate occassions I tried to get quotes from VA. The first time was for a home system; I never got a response.
The second time was for a cluster of systems that cost around $20k. I got a response from Rep #1, and a little later Rep #2 asked if anyone was handling it yet, and I said that Rep #1 was helping me.
So far, so good. Except... I never got the quote! No follow-ups, and no responses when I sent them several inquiries about the status of the quote. VA never sent me anything after the initial "I am working on a quote for you".
On both occassions I ended up going with a local dealer.
If this is how VA reacts when you are trying to GIVE them money, I can imagine what it'd be like trying to get support, which COSTS them money.
"I was shocked to find that the Penquins and VAs of the world don't provide on-site warranty service"
Actually VA Linux Systems does and has offered On-Site service for the past 1 1/2 years. We currently have over 2000 field engineers available to us across North America.
Jeff RitterSupport Manager, VA Linux Systems
I'd like to second Mr. Phillip's experience. In my last job we purchased some VA equipment and were largely disappointed in the hardware. When we ran into problems with it, we were even more disappointed with the support.
When we decided we want to purchase some upgrades (new raid chassis and disks), we found the experience even worse, as we encountered delays, misinformation, and the sort of runaround that makes it clear how much VA values their customers.
My recommendation is to go with a major vendor such as Compaq, HP, etc. The equipment you get may cost a bit more, but it will also be of far higher quality. And it will still run Linux.
--
Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars@larsshack.org>
Agreed on the ASL recommendation. I've got two personal machines from them, which I love, a new 1U rack mount machine which is amazingly well built (I had to take off the cover first thing...very well put together) and am waiting for a couple 2U machines that should be here next week.
:))
They do install Mandrake (or RH or SuSE) if that turns you on. I managed to leave RH on one of my personal machines for 6 months before debianizing it. The new machiness didn't last 10 minutes before getting formatted. (Nothing wrong with ASL's install... I just like systems I install myself better.:))
I haven't used their support either, but damn, they make nice machines, and they're quite affordable. If their sales folks are any indication, their tech staff should be excellent.
I just hope as people discover them, ASL is able to keep up their quality.
(And, nope, I don't have any relation to ASL other than being a very happy customer.
...but those blue LEDs are just damn cool.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
You seem to have made a few assumptions:
1. That VA sent a machine with no OS.
2. The distro was the problem.
He bought two machines. One worked and one did not. He sent the one that did not back to VA. Who kept the machine for two weeks and sent it back with parts missing. This has nothging to do with your example.
A more apt example would be. You buy a Ford vehicle and decide to put a delco battery in it. The vehicle will not start, so you take it to the Ford dealer and they return it to you with the alternator missing.
VA Linux had a responsibility to provide working hardware. They were not obligated to support Mandrake. They failed to provide working hardware.
Troy
Honestly? No. But I'm pretty sure that while it could scale, that the performance isn't there. We're also looking at table segmentation, parallel servers, and all sorts of other crap (that's over my head -- I'm a sysadmin, not a DBA (thank god)).
Unfortunately, it's too late anyways. A lot of Oracle specific code has been written.
I don't see where it makes any differance what distro you use. other than the previously mentioned time lag in support. Very few users get a server and do nothing to it before including it in there net. The software is certainly not in a standard config. after that. Even the all mighty /. uses debian on some of its VA servers!
I basically agree with you. But:
All any company like VA does is take off-the-shelf OEM parts, slap a machine together, and glue a little plastic logo on the front of the case.
While there are many companies like that, VA is not one of them.
They know Linux, what it needs, and what it does. They specialize in Linux and Linux compatibility. This is more then I can say for Dell, Compaq, or HP at this point.
VA does a good deal of research and testing to make sure their stuff is Linux compatible.
VA provides Linux-specific documentation.
They do a fair amount of custom engineering when needed, especially in their low-profile rack-mount servers.
They give back to the Linux community quite a bit.
Now, none of this excuses poor customer service or quality, but your claim that VA is just another Intel PC VAR isn't true.
Youre not getting anything you couldn't otherwise assemble on your own, or obtain from a larger LInux systems vendor such as IBM, Dell, and others.
I think not.
HP: Other then in press releases, their hardware literature doesn't mention Linux, and you can't configure a system with Linux pre-installed on it. Doesn't look too promising to me.
Compaq: LOL. Their "Linux" page wants to sell you machines with Windows pre-installed. Give me a break.
IBM: I haven't dealt with IBM on Linux, but I have gotten the impression that, while serious about Linux, they are still ramping up to really support it well on their Intel lines. But at least they'll sell you a system with Linux on it.
Dell: Will sell you a system with Linux, and at least seems to be committed to it. But, they really have a ways to go. They will happilly bundle NT software with your Linux system, and wonder why you say you cannot use it. And their Linux driver support is iffy.
Would I buy a VA Linux system? Unlikely. Are they doing as good a job as they should? Maybe not. Are they as bad as you make them out to be? No.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The problem i see with the current support options for companies who don't have people in house (the office i work in is 100% computer geeks, so needless to say, we _are_ our own tech support), is that most support options are very platform/processor/distro dependant. Companies specialize in one or another thing, and are afraid to do anything else. Sometimes the best solution is a combination of solutions... At work we have 1 NT machine to run legacy apps, 1 BSD machine to run mySQL, 1 Linux machine to run a cluster head/job dispaching program, and several BSD machines running jobs for the cluster head, and then most of our generic networking/routing/filtering/serving sort of machines run Linux of one flavor or another.
The trick is that each job calls for it's own special configuration. What we really need is a company that hires a group of geeks with diverse experience, and who are willing to learn new stuff at customer request. Have the customer pay by the man hour above a certain yearly amount pre-included in their plan, and have all your geeks watch some central job dispach system and take jobs that they are interrested in, or that land in their area of knowledge. I think that this will take more effort than the average scheme, but i think in the end it's worth it because you don't have the problem of stubborn monolithic support companies who work down their problem tree and can't help you if your desired configuration isn't EXACTLY listed in their little book.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I really wish this was an option with PHBs, but it's not.
I work in a place that pays Oracle hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a support contract. I asked a PHB once what all that money was going for. He said technical support, with the added protection that should anything go wrong that Oracle can't fix within 24 hours, they can sue.
Kinda funny, since the last thing the company wants is to sue anybody. It's long, slow, expensive, and it's much easier from the start to just have it done right. Oh, by, let's see...by RTFM and doing it yourself.
But keep in mind that support contracts are mostly for PHBs who want to have that warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Contracts should come with a free blanket and teddy bear or pacifier if you ask me.
They can be useful, but most of the time they're just a crutch.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I don't feel that this is the answer. The reason that Mandrake was formed after Red Hat is that there are different types of hardware, and there are different needs. Windows addresses as many as possible, but they can't address al. Red Hat compiles for i386 instruction sets, whereas Mandrake compiles with the full Pentium instruction set (getting in many cases a %25 performance gain), but if you have a 386, you can't use that distro. I feel that diversity gives the linux community strength.
Deven Phillips, CISSP
Network Architect
Viata Online, Inc.
Wherever you go, there I am...