Best support call stories.

[Steven E. Protter]

I hope most of us have had positive experience with HP support people making super human effort.

Post your stories, five points a story.

Mine: We suddenly lost access to every disk in our two HP-6000 disk arrays. At 8 p.m. with a SUV full of groceries, I had to drive in and work the call. HP had been notified a few hours earlier.

Our hardware rep dropped the call daytime and we escalated the call.

A wonderful woman, a senior support person took ownerhip of the call.

We spent six hours working remotely, finally we realized we needed parts replacement.

She hopped in her van and drove downtown at 2 a.m. After replacing both power supplies and lots of internal cables, we got the system back up for users at 6 a.m.

Over and above the call of duty.

Though I've forgotten her name, I did speak to her supervisor and give her kudos....

[Patrick Wallek]

I was scheduled to fly out to a conference on a flight leaving at about 6:00 PM, I think. Lo and behold, I had a disk tray (one the HP6000 disk trays) turn up inaccessible at about noon. Call HP. Service guy comes out and we troubleshoot and troubleshoot and finally decide that the internal SCSI cable is bad.

We had just moved to another building in the same city, only about 6 blocks away, and had a twin system sitting in the other data center ready to be shipped to a reseller. Instead of going back to HP and getting parts, we went to the other data center, scavenged parts from one of the HP6000 trays there, went back to the new data center, got the parts installed and the tray back up and running.

The best part, I made it to my flight on time and had fun at the conference.

[Pete Randall]

Well, it's not an HP support call story - it's a "me" support call story:

I used to have a night operator who would call me in the middle of the night, ask "guess what", and then wait for me to guess, no matter how long I waited for him to go on and explain the problem.

I do have an HP one, though. I had a K570 that died on New Year's Eve. Placed the call for assistance and eventually got a call back from a C.E. who was 3 hours away (up here in the wilderness of Vermont my normal C.E. is a little over an hour away in Connecticut - this poor guy was coming from somewhere around Poughkeepsie, New York - he had to travel through four states just to get here). Anyway, he finally arrived with a van full of parts and we proceeded to tear the machine apart, replacing one CPU board at a time, trying to find the faulty one. We had to pull the power supply, open up the back, pull out the cpu, replace, put every thing back, then wait 20 minutes while the stupid thing re-booted - only to do it all over again because we hadn't found the right one. After spending the whole night at it, he finally gave up from exhaution and called in the replacements. He may not have solved the problem but he sure does get an "A+" for effort.

Pete

[Ken Hubnik_2]

Years ago HP support determined that we had a bad bus card in our T500. Our CE drives an hour brings out the card and it is bad. Orders another one, gets it flown in, and it is bad. Luckily the third time was the charm. Ever here of a bad batch of cookies???

[Pete Randall]

I used to have a C.E. from another company (they make big mainframes) who told of being asked to fix a keypunch machine (anybody remember those) that intermittently but regularly inserted spaces into the data being entered. After working on the machine for quite some time, the C.E. had found nothing wrong so he asked the keypunch operator (a rather heavily endowed woman) to demonstrate the problem. After watching her for a few moments, he suggested that she go get a coffee. When she came back she was thrilled to find that her machine functioned perfectly. The C.E. had raised her chair a couple notches to keep her "endowments" from bouncing on the space bar. Of course, he never told her exactly what the problem was.

Pete

[harry d brown jr]

It was in the middle of a winter here in Rochester NY, and the temperature rose so the snow started to melt. One of our buildings had a clogged drain causing the weight of the water to rip open the roof, and of course right above our development computer room. Our HP engineer, that "knows" our environment, came in on his day off to help us move the servers, dry them off, and get them back up and running in another computer room. We actually had water pouring on top of at least seven cabinets, and all we lost was one console, and another consoles keyboard!


live free or die
harry

[Steven E. Protter]

That Rep on the endowment problem. He has real class.

Steve

[Michael Tully]

(bad timing story) The worst story I had was on Christmas Eve in 1982, yes 20 years ago, where I had to drive from Brookvale on the Northern Beaches to Blaxland which is in the Blue Mountains (Sydney Australia). There was some sort of power problem. When I got there I discovered that the machine was certainly plugged in, but apparently the cleaner has used the power point during the night and had unplugged the computer to plug in his vaccum cleaner. When he finished, he left the power off. How great it was to travel 2 hours each way by car only to find this little gem.

[Brian M Rawlings]

HP Support is good folks. Even when I get a first-line "have you checked the power plug?" kind of guy, I've learned to be patient and jump through their hoops, because I need them on my side, not put off by any attitude I'm feeling on my end ("hurry UP and get me to LEVEL 2....!")

Anyway, I'm working for a client who is running MC/Serviceguard (2 nodes) and running Omniback as a failover package. We had to install a FWD card in each server, so we scheduled some downtime (middle of the night, of course).

Shutdown goes fine, cards both go in fine, reboot goes fine.... but MC/SG won't come up. What the bleep? We didn't change anything! After several attempts (neither server will start clustering), we call HP. The customer is panicing, production has to be back up soon, and backups have to kick off, etc.

HP support shot me straight to a level-2 guy, and we worked it for a while, he brought in additional support, and at some point they started suggesting stupid things like checking /etc/hosts for localhost, checking DNS, netmask, IP setup, come on guys, this is a Serviceguard issue...

But OK, I jumped through their hoops, one of which was to change /etc/hosts entries to be the fully qualified domain names, instead of the host names only. BAM, MC/SG came up like a champ. What on earth?

Upon further questioning (no bamboo slivers were involved, but it's the thought that counts, right?), the customer "remembered" that several months earlier, they had changed their corporate name space, DNS, everything, due to a merger. Apparently, somebody did a shortcut on the clustered servers so as to avoid rebooting them, and made some IP/addressing changes on the fly, which worked... until we rebooted. The cluster hadn't been rebooted in about 5 months, and this was just waiting to clober anybody stupid enough to bounce the servers.

Needless to say, when the Omniback package failed to initialize properly, I went straight to /etc/hosts, and fixed the entries for all the packages as well, plus sent an email to the DNS admin to fix his entries for all these items (the only one that was right was the public address for the Oracle package).

HP Support came through big that night, it would have taken me a lot longer to go down the crazy DNS/hosts route to fix this one. It also gave me patience with "please go check the LAN cable", etc, since no suggestion is "stupid" anymore.

We got out of there around 4AM, happy to be alive and running backups, and very appreciative of HP and their suport staff.

Later --bmr

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

my best support story:

The server boot disk crashed while I, as usual if such happens, was in holidays.
My company tried to contact me in Hungary, but they had no success - and - thank 'HP' they didn't need me.
HP support rebuilt the boot disk with installation CD and my backup tape. Everything worked fine when I returned.
So the HP guy saved my holidays.

Thanks again man!

Regards
Volkmar

[Marco Santerre]

Fortunately for me, mine only happened in the middle of the night. It was the night between Saturday and Sunday. Back then, I was a Sys Admin but on the HP 3000 side. I'm doing an upgrade that I have been planning with a SE for quite a while now. Everything is going smoothly and I'm thinking : "Great I'm going to be out of here quick" tsk-tsk-tsk.. I learnt since then NEVER to think those things. Anyway, long story, after calling the HP Response Center (does anyone remember they used to call it PICS?), they tell me I need a Patch and that they will build a tape and FedEx the next morning. Naturally, this means I have to leave everything in that state 'til the morning, which is unacceptable to my boss. So I take a chance and decide I will leave a message on my SE cell phone. Low and behold the guy answers his cell phone in the middle of the night. He decided to go to his office and cut the tape for me with the patch I needed. Brought it to me within an hour and a half or so. Needless to say that his boss got a nice letter from me and I made sure my boss signed on it too.

[W.C. Epperson]

My best HP support story is about an HP3000 Model 30 that began crashing shortly after midnight each night. We'd come in the next morning and find the auxiliary disk drive unplugged from the electric outlet. After accusing the janitorial staff and changing locks after repeated occurrences and denials, I spent the night in the computer room to scope out what was happening. About midnight, the drive began banging and vibrating like crazy, edging across the floor until it pulled the plug. Turned out a condense (vinit -pcond) was running every night, and once there was enough data on the disk, the vibration was too much....

HP called those drives "Maytags" for years, internally.

But my best support story of all was the time I needed to upgrade from "next business day" support from Cisco (Saturday of a holiday weekend, NBD was Tuesday and our Internet was down). It's 10 o'clock Saturday night and I call the TAC, which answers "G'day, mate". The nice Australian fellow took my credit card number and charged me $1500US to get delivery at my home by 9:00 Sunday morning, via UPS. About quarter to nine I was in the driveway cleaning the windshield on one of the cars when I heard what sounded like a pretty good sized truck coming up the hill. Into sight rolled a '89 Chevrolet Caprice with a vinyl top hanging in shreds and a hole in the muffler. A dredlocked fellow stuck his head out and said, "Are you W.C. Epperson, mon?". I admitted it, and he gave me my router blade. I thanked him and said, "That's the darndest UPS truck I ever saw". He said, "No, we UPS lo-gistics, mon. UPS don't pick up no package in da middle a da night."

[Byron Myers]

We have a number of V-class systems, and for a while we moved components from some systems to others like memory, NICs, etc. (Why is another, very long story). I would give our site HP CE a call and he would always make it to our shop that day and do the work - at no charge. I compare this with another vendor of ours - to hide their identity I will scramble the letters in their name (BMI). This other vendor shipped us a number of servers with 50 MHz 64-bit Gbit Ethernet cards installed in 33 MHz PCI slots - these servers had no cards installed in their 50 MHz slots. Our contract with them voided our warranty if we ever opened up one of these boxers. We asked them to move these Gbit cards into the 50 MHz slots. They said sure, we will have to charge you hourly with a two hour mimimum to do so. We could NOT convince them that the 50 MHz Gbit cards peforms better in the 50 MHz slot, as designed! They kept saying over and over and over and ..., yeh, but this card works in the 33 MHz slot. After a month of trying to educate the worlds largest computer manufacturer that a 50 MHz Gbit card can pump data faster than the same card dummed down to 33 MHz, we gave up. Today, these servers still have their 50 Mhz Gbit cards dummed down into the 33 Mhz PCI slots.

[John Payne_2]

We have great support engineers out of Salt Lake City. They are all really good and get us going when we need them. I used to be a student operator, followed by a operations shift supervisor here. (We are a university) I used to look over everyones shoulder when the systems guys logged a call, and would log the call to HP myself whenever they let me. The CE's and backline people were always very nice and patient when it was me calling and I didn't necessarily know what I was talking about.

Anyway, an 'above and beyond' story doesn't stick out, but a 'below and buried' story does... We once had a processor on a K580 blow, and the support guy came in to replace it. He up placing the processors on top of the UPS for the machine, no static pad or antything. Me being just a student operator aid "should you set those there?" and he said it was all right to do. We had every single one of those procs blow in the next year...

We had a nickname for that guy...

That was in the past. we love the service we get these days.

John