rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (01/05/89)
Does anyone have ANYTHING good to say about the service they are receiving from FPS on their Celerities? I can't think of one positive aspect. They promised us a software update last June. (August 1986 was the last software update.) If you have to place a service call, when someone finally answers the phone, if you're lucky they'll take a message to have someone call you back. If hell freezes over, someone might call you back. Their "overnight" board swap has never taken less that 2 days. They also seem to have the attitude that you are trying to cheat them out of replacement boards. (Like you have nothing better to do than swap boards on your down system.) With Celerity, you called them up and said "processor 1 is dead" and they shipped you a replacement processor. With FPS it's like you have to provide 3 notarized statements from independent experts verifying that your machine is dead. Questions like "Are you sure its down" are so pathetic it's hard not to laugh at them. (What do they want? A check for pulse and respiration?) The service is so bad that we are considering dropping the service contract and the next time the computer breaks, scrapping it. So the question is, is this typical of FPS or have they singled us out for "special" treatment. ---rick
dan@ccnysci.UUCP (Dan Schlitt) (01/05/89)
Right here on my desk is a "Customer Survey" from FPS. It provides me
"an opportunity to influence the quality of support and service
provided by FPS." Maybe rick will get the opportunity as well.
Our experience is that we have received no service from FPS (none).
It is fortunate that our system has been relatively well behaved and
has not required service. The last we have heard from either Celerity
or FPS except for copies of press releases was our tape for NFS which
we purchased just before the great demise.
Although our Celerity is not yet connected to the Internet, I assume
that there are some which are. The great internet worm episode should
have brought some patches. We are binary only, so we must depend on
the vendor for patches for most things. The sendmail backdoor was
open on our system -- I could patch that -- and I assume that the ftpd
problem exists as well. I don't think I can fix that with adb.
Fingerd probably also requires fixing. Those should be high priority
fixes. But nothing from FPS but a survey.
Maybe it is high time to make some loud noise.
Dan Schlitt Manager, Science Division Computer Facility
dan@ccnysci City College of New York
dan@ccnysci.bitnet New York, NY 10031
(212)690-6868