Re[2]: OT: Interesting News..

I can't say anything either positive or negative about Compaq as I've had no experience with their support organization. On the other hand I did watch DEC support go from great to abysmal in just 5 years. HP on the other hand has been the 'cats meow' for the last 10 years that I've had experience with them.

    My example case is TCP Keep Alive inside the kernel. Our problem was people rebooting their DOS workstations in the middle of a query (Oracle 6.0.3x). The 'servers' in this case were an old HP-9000/847 and a DEC 240 workstation. Same problem on each machine, people would reboot leaving the Oracle dedicated server process hanging out to dry. The DEC got so bad that I was getting nightly pages from the manufacturing folks which required a re-boot each time. (Yeah, this was a badly designed application) Anyhow, I called the appropriate support organization to see what could be done at the OS level.

    HP passed me back to the kernel group where the individual id'd the problem to TCPKeepAlive in about 2 seconds. Asked if I could get the kernel into the debugger. I did & he passed me several commands and asked what I got. What I got was something like 10000000000. He stated that this was infinity & that I should change it so something more reasonable like 30000 which would be 5 minutes (HP time). I followed his suggestions, rebooted the machine & the problem left, immediately.

    DEC on the other hand bounced the same problem around in their support organization for 18 months before I was told by a kernel specialist that they had never implemented TCPKeepAlive in Ultrix & that I would upgrade to OSF-1, end conversation & he hung up.

    Needless to say we did upgrade, to HP.

Dick Goulet

____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: Jared Still <jkstill_at_cybcon.com>
Date:       9/7/2001 4:45 AM

Isn't that a little unfair? It hardly seems possible that an entire organization could be full of induhviduals.

More likely, some bad experiences have colored your judgment.

Please bear in mind that there are several Compaq employees on this list as well.

Jared

On Thursday 06 September 2001 14:10, Jesse, Rich wrote:
> Hmmmm...
>
> Compaq service does suck at all levels. However, I have to defend HP
> service. We aren't a huge company (<800 employees), but we do have Gold
> Service with HP for our little 6-way K570. And I have to say that it's
> been outstanding. I've never seen another service company stay onsite for
> 24+ hours on their weekend to help with our OS upgrade.
>
> Or it could just be our local guys'n'gals that do an outstanding job... :)
>
> Rich Jesse System/Database Administrator
> Rich.Jesse_at_qtiworld.com Quad/Tech International, Sussex, WI USA
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 15:22
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> According to our hardware resalescritter: especially for anything
> below large enterprise level, both HP and Compaq services suck.
>
> so, I guess the objective is to create a new company who services
> suck even more than either individually?
>
> Synergy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> > Guy Hammond wrote:
> > > On the contrary, I'd say this is a godsend for Sun. Compaq made a mess
> > > of truly epic proportions when they tried to integrate DEC and Tandem
> > > into their operations. HP did just as badly with Apollo.
>
> ...

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