What Is Fair Technical Support From a Manufacturer?

VincenzoRomano asks: "One year ago, I decided to buy some 'enterprise grade' firewalls, in order to replace the old ones used by a former ISP. Before buying, I did a bit of a survey. I browsed the product 'data sheets' from the manufacturer web sites, and in some cases, asked for more details by email. I finally choose a top product, that had been on the market for a year and a half, from a very well known and reputable company. The product showed a number of issues as soon as it was unpacked and put to work, that you would not expect from something 'enterprise grade', like not being able to keep a VPN up and running for more than a few minutes, or doing bad IP routing on our LAN. I've spent the last year to make the equipment working, accordingly to both their data sheets and the features expected from an 'enterprise grade' product. Important issues are still open while the technical support is actually relying on my own stuff and setup, and on my personal availability in order to do troubleshooting, firmware beta testing and other experiments. I've finally decided that the product was far from being ready to market or even usable for beta testers, and have requested some kind of compensation for all the job I had to do. What's your opinion about such a behavior in a company? Is it fair?"

Comments

Welcome to IT?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

What you're describing was fairly commonplace back in 1994-1997 when I was helping start up a regional ISP. To a certain extent, it was "neat" that we were finding bugs in brand new routers (Cisco + Bay were the usual culprits). Of course, it was a pain in the ass that it'd typically take hours, days, or weeks to realize that the hardware/software was bugged.

As technology has progressed, things certainly have gotten better. Regardless, you need to realize that "shit breaking" is part of IT. Don't like it? Leave the field.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[Sobrique]

Sadly so. Almost any product out there has bugs. If you're lucky, the really sucky ones are already gone. But only if you're lucky. I have memories of a NAS upgrade, that resulted in 8 TB of 'possibly corrupt' data, over long enough interval that just restoring a 'known good' backup just wasn't an option.

I'm afraid it's normal that 'new toys' have problems. Your only way of really avoiding, or at least migating this is to stay one release behind the latest and greatest. You've got good odds that by the time the 'next release' is finished, most of the real killer gotchas will have been found.

In part, it's laziness in testing. In part, it's the simple fact that it's definitely non-trivial to exhaustively test something in teh kind of intensive environment you see in the 'real world'. Things like race conditions typically don't occur often enough to be noticed in testing, but will start to crop up often enough to be a real problem in the real world.

Acceptable? No, not really. Fairly commonplace? Hell yeah.

Don't trust any .0 release. Don't trust anything that's sold to you as the 'newest and feature laden'. Ask yourself if you _really_ need that totally new and cool (and therefore almost certainly not properly tested) feature, or if actually, a revision or two back would do what you need.

With the best will in the world, a test environment will never really compete with a couple of hundred thousand people using it, for finding 'problems'.

You will almost certainly find that the EULA also includes a get out clause for exactly this kind of behaviour.

You took too long

[Overzeetop]

You bought it. It didn't work. Tech support couldn't fix the problem.

You had two options: work with the reduced functionality or send the product back. It sounds like you chose the former and are now regretting the decision.

Maybe you needed a custom solution that was actually outside of your budget.