The Book of Kuzma

HP Screws the Pooch. Royally

Here’s the background. We have several HP DL320G5p servers that we use as dedicated servers for our customers. All these HP servers have active, 4 hour onsite response, 24x7, 3 year Care Pack Extended Service Agreements in place.

One of the machines has a fan failure. The ILO management card sees this, and shuts down the OS as a protective measure. That’s uncool on a production machine. I call 1-800-HP-INVENT to start the support process at 2:40pm on Saturday. The tech runs me through a couple of diagnostic procedures, verifies the replacement part number, and sets it up for onsite delivery. The call was finished by 3pm.

Now, about geography. My home is an hour and a half drive from our Datacenter in Orlando. HP has parts depots all over the place, including Orlando. In fact, the Orlando Depot is about 10 miles away from the datacenter. So, I fully expected that the part would be there when I arrived at 5:30.

No part. No call from HP either. So, I killed the time by updating some outstanding helpdesk tickets.

6:40 rolls around, so I call in again to 1-800-HP-INVENT to check the status of the ticket. After all they still have time. I spend 45 minutes on hold only to told that the part is on backorder. What the hell? I’m given a different 1-800 number to call.

Another 30 minutes on hold, and they tell me that the earliest ETA for the part is Tuesday morning, making it a 50-some odd hour Care Pack. That’s unacceptable. I asked for a supervisor. They give me the same line. Up another level we go.

“Yes, I’m the customer. I’m the guy who authorizes the purchase of HP equipment and warranties. And you’ve already blown your Service Level Agreement by 3 hours.”

“Oh, shit.”

At this point, I don’t care if they have to charter a damned Gulfstream to get the part to me. (I’ve seen IBM do this once. My dad used to work for IBM’s Printing systems Division, and Publix was one of the accounts he serviced. No shit, they chartered a Learjet to fly in a spring for a printer).

They’ll call me back. At 9pm I said screw it, and started driving home. Halfway home, and I get a call from HP. They’ve setup a flight for the part, and it will be in Orlando at 5:25pm, on Sunday. I bite my lip. That’s 27 hours after I opened the support case.

So, by this point, I have wasted 6 hours of my time, and half a tank of gas. By the time this gets resolved, assuming that the part is in fact delivered when they say it will be, that will become likely 10 hours of time, and a full tank of gas.

And you know the funny thing? This is a damned $60 part.

Serving JSON from ASP.net MVC

Here’s the Visual Studio Solution from my Tech Ed Speaker Idol talk. It Works On My Machine. I’m not running SP1 of Visual Studio 2008 or .net 3.5. I’m using Preview 3 of ASP.net MVC.

Quo Vadis

It’s time for a bit of reflection, as we get ready to celebrate ElectroNerdz’ fifth birthday. The actual day was Monday, but Jason and I, along with my wife and one of Jason’s Lady-Friends, are going out tonight to celebrate.

Looking back at the year and a half since I shut down my own consultancy, and buy into ElectroNerdz, we’ve accomplished some astonishing things. From FY2005, to FY2006, we more than doubled our revenue. From FY2006 to FY2007, we again more than doubled our revenue.

We’ve added new services, and expanded our capabilities.

In the last 6 months, we’ve doubled the size of our space at Atlantic.net’s datacenter.

We’ve added Hosted Exchange 2007 to our portfolio.

Remote Offsite backups? Got that.

Managed and monitored Security? Yep.

Plain vanilla web and mail hosting? Got that too.

Complete, offsite environments? Went live with the first one earlier this week.

It’s amazing to see what we’ve done in the last year.

But the question that’s coming now, is this… Where are we going?

I imagine that that will be quite a topic of conversation this evening.

DotNetPanel and Public Folders with Exchange 2007

To give a user Owner permissions to public folders, use the following PowerShell cmd-let:

Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -Identity -AccessRights Owner -User

Manufacturer Support

I’m in the process of setting up ElectroNerdz’ new, massive, hosting services SAN appliance. Almost 6 terabytes of storage available. Yum.

Anyhoo, After initializing the array (which took the better part of 5 hours), and installing CentOS 5 64-bit, I reboot and get a kernel panic. I google for the various errors, and find nothing of use. I then try CentOS 5 32-bit, same result. CentOS 4.5, ditto. Fedora, ditto. Debian, ditto.

I’m about ready to throw the rather massive system through a wall, and decide to call 3Ware’s support number. (We’re using a 3Ware 9550SXU storage controller.)

Normally, I’m loathe to call manufacturer support, since typically, you end up with a barely literate idiot following a script, and it takes 4 hours to get to someone who either a) Speaks English, or b) has a clue that isn’t printed in front of them.

I quickly explained the situation, and the support rep replied: “The partitioning tools that those installers use can’t handle partitions larger than 2TB. They screw up the geometry, and you’ll get a kernel panic about 90% of the time. Use parted.”

I thanked him, and hung up. Well, it worked. 3Ware (I suppose technically they’re AMCC now) gets a big thumbs up in my book.

Suprising

...For Various Values of Geek

I’m a geek. For several odd and esoteric values of geek. People often have to stop me in mid conversation, asking: “Can you say that again in English?”.

I’ve been dealing with Verizon for one of our customers, who is having issues with a newly installed voice T-1. For those of you who don’t speak Telco, a T-1 is a single pair of copper wires, like a phone line. Except, it can carry 24 channels of stuff, either voice or data, by dividing up the signals and alternatining between them.

T-1’s generally work, or they are horribly munged and b0rked in ways that are painful to explain.

I was just on a conference call bridge with a tech from Verizon National Helpdesk, and a CO tech. I actually had to stop them and ask, “Can you translate that from Telco to High Geek for me?”

Stocks

I just sold off my position in Smith & Wesson Holding company. I bought it back in January at 10.50 a share. It sold for 17.08 a share. Gotta love picking them.

Why sell? I’m not greedy. I set my goal on the investment, and met it, so now I’m getting out of it. That’s all there is to it.

Laptop

I’m going to TechEd next week, so of course my laptop decides to go Tango Uniform. No matter, I’m loading up it’s successor, a HP/Compaq 6510b with 4 gb of RAM running Windows Vista…

It’s giving me a chance to work out my list of Must Have developer tools:

Visual Studio 2005 SP1

DevExpress CodeRush

DevExpress RefactorPro

LLBLGen Pro

NCover

MBUnit
NUnit
TestDriven.net
Powershell

*More as I install ‘em*

Laptop

I’m going to TechEd next week, so of course my laptop decides to go Tango Uniform. No matter, I’m loading up it’s successor, a HP/Compaq 6510b with 4 gb of RAM running Windows Vista…

It’s giving me a chance to work out my list of Must Have developer tools:

Visual Studio 2005 SP1

DevExpress CodeRush

DevExpress RefactorPro

LLBLGen Pro

NCover

MBUnit
NUnit
TestDriven.net
Powershell

*More as I install ‘em*

At the Airport Pt 1

Brittani and I are sitting in Tampa International Airport waiting for our 8:45am flight that begins our journey to Seattle.

Our original itinerary had us connecting in DFW, but the gods of Air Transport have decided to have some fun with us. We’re having a 2 hour layover at Chicago-Ordway, in the People’s Democratic Soviet Republic of Illinois. Gaaa. Why?

Jason picked us up at 5:40, we got to the airport by 6:30, and we’re sitting in the terminal waiting as of 7:11.

The TSA managed to have to rescan my laptop bag… idiots were chatting when it went through and it didn’t get looked at until a supervisory person made a funny face and they rescanned it. Either that or they were confused by the electronics density. Whatever.

At least I didn’t get pegged for a secondary screening.