Ten years of techsupport tricks (Things I've Learned)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

To start you off, here's fifteen frenetic and fantastic finalists. Add your own revelations!


- Reboots. Users who object to a reboot (or sound like they might, or lie about having rebooted) are usually quite happy to reboot "again" if you tell them you need them to read off the words which come up (BIOS crap) during the process.

- Cable checks. Users will lie about having checked their cable is plugged in, but they'll be happy to unplug a cable, blow in the socket or on the pins, and plug the cable back in.

- Questions. Never, EVER ask a question which can be answered with( Yes or No... (see more) )

Hardware and software support FAIL.

[jecook]

So $work bought a couple Power6-based servers a couple months ago as part of one of our major projects. (And at a significant cost, I might add.) Said servers also came with an expansion 'drawer' (really a rack mount chassis with a daughter board and additional space for disks). We've had a vendor in all week trying to get the OS and hardware fully configured.

Several lengthy calls to IBM's support and a visit from one of their field circus droids later, everything's back up and running.

For what appears to be some cables that were not connected by the ven-duh, an incorrectly connected set of cables, and a firmware update, something that would have taken about 2 hours to correct properly.

Now, I already know what half of you are going to say: "who didn't read the instructions?" Well, I certainly did, but I was looking for something else entirely at the time, and I assumed that the ven-duh knew better already- we bought the gear on their spec, after all. At least the Field Circus droid knew what the hell he was doing, and between him and IBM's support, got things up and running.

The fun part? We get to do this again when the rack we need for the second server arrives.