"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.
Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Ritter, I am the support manager from VA who is in charge of all of our tech support departments in Tulsa and here in California.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
"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 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