Re: More on Oracle Support

Well, the model of Oracle Support is flown in principle. You pay pre- defined amount of support fees per year and the less they do for you, the better the business. If there is competitive service available - such approach could benefit only in very short term. But you can't simply change support vendor - you do need updates and access to support in some cases so you can't change them to another competitive provider. Unless you are willing to change to another database but I'm not sure if support from other DB vendors is better.

This is why existence of strong user communities, such as Oracle-L, is great. If you need more than community support, there are other service providers that can apply more intensive therapy to your Oracle databases and, perhaps, provide special skills to deal with Oracle Support. You can call it advanced support if you wish.

But I digress... Practical advise would be to request formal requirements without guidance to a specific firewall implementation. You should feel free to call Oracle support and request to speak to manager on duty and inform him about this concern and how important this case for your company and how many millions you are loosing and etc. I noticed that often DBA's are not comfortable in such conversation and management involvement (you would need somewhat pushy approach) provides good results. There is no need to know technical details -- just need to emphasize importance and ask to escalate.

Cheers,
Alex

On 3-Apr-08, at 7:40 PM, William Wagman wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I find myself again frustrated with Oracle support and I'm looking for
> some feedback. I recently encountered difficulties with CRS
> functioning
> on a two node cluster running on 32-bit linux with Oracle 10.2.0.3.0
> SE.
> I opened an SR with Oracle and ultimately the problem was resolved by
> turning off firewalls and insuring that SELinux was not enabled. I am
> not completely aware of the firewall configurations as those are
> handled
> by the system administrator. At any rate, when the problems were
> resolved I asked the analyst for some information regarding firewall
> configurations and CRS and he offered that if we have Linux support
> from
> Oracle he could ask the linux group. He said this was a question re
> CRS
> pre-requisites. I'm puzzled, I would expect that if these are in fact
> CRS pre-requisites that Oracle should be able to answer them, after
> all,
> isn't CRS an Oracle product? I'm not sure how to respond or if I am
> even
> expecting too much from them. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Bill Wagman
> Univ. of California at Davis
> IET Campus Data Center
> wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
> (530) 754-6208
>
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> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>

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