vjs@rhyolite.SGI.COM (Vernon Schryver) (07/10/88)
Are Microport 'Hotline Support' or 'Upgrade service' worth it? I recently purchased for my private, evening use, a "limited" 386-system with DOS-merge. (After a bunch of bumbling trying to make tapes work, they tell me that $1300 is not enough. Their recommended backup medium, Everex tape, requires an optional, $100 driver. The alternative is diskettes. Is this real unix, without any removable mass storage? One has expects a certain minimum, even from System V.) If I send a bunch of bug reports to Microport, what good will it do me? Will I get fixes or patches? Are updates frequent, with lots of fixes? Fully characterizing a bug so that someone can reproduce and fix it is real work. Writing a coherent report is worse. I don't need to pay money for the opportunity. I ask because, during these first 7 days of my free (sic) 30 days of support (free=~$700, the $ difference between BTI & Microport), I've had mixed experiences. One person knew things, and was anxious and able to help. Two seemed less knowedgable, or were tired, or forced at gun-point to answer the phone. A fourth person was a zilch. Perhaps last week was bad for them. It did take forever to get thru--they were very busy. I can probably come up with work-arounds myself, when it is possible. I could certainly consult the SVR3.x source the next day. However, I don't intend to steal source, the bug fixes, or even the raw time for which SGI, my employer, pays. So, should I spend the couple of hours to document and submit the bugs I've found so far? Should I send them another $350 for support & upgrades? What have long-time Microport customers found? (Given that I've already spent $700 more than BTI's price, you can probably guess the answer I'm hoping for.) Vernon Schryver vjs@sgi.com
hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (07/12/88)
Whether support is worth it depends upon what you expect. My experience is that their user support is fairly good. I define that as including answering questions and helping work around known problems. However as far as I can tell, their user support people don't fix kernel bugs. So if you call them and report that their tty driver drops characters, they may be able to give you help in finding a configuration that minimizes problems, but you shouldn't expect the support person to fix the problem. Actually, this is a common distinction to make. At Sun it seems like many of the support people don't even have access to developers at all, which isn't true at Microport. I did get an interim release from uport once under my contract, and it did resolve a serious problem I was having. But there are continuing problems with SV/AT in the areas of serial support, floating point, memory management, and support of certain hard disk configurations. They have people working on these problems, and probably they'll be fixed in 6 months to a year. But you shouldn't expect that the support person you get on the phone is somehow going to be able to make them go away.
david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) (07/14/88)
In article <17124@sgi.SGI.COM> vjs@rhyolite.SGI.COM (Vernon Schryver) asks: >Are Microport 'Hotline Support' or 'Upgrade service' worth it? > >If I send a bunch of bug reports to Microport, what good will it do >me? Will I get fixes or patches? Are updates frequent, with lots of >fixes? ... The answer is NO. There are ways to deal with Microport but buying their services is not the most effective. Who nees Hotline Support when the switchboard operators can't even transfer the calls? Even if you do get through to somebody after several calls, they seldom can offer much help with real problems (unless you have the "is the power turned on?" type problems, which I doubt). It's cheaper and faster to figure out solutions yourself. I bought the upgrade contract. I guess I got what I paid for but I think one could get anything I got *without* buying the upgrade service. As for bug reporting. I have sent in quite a few. I even went so far as to prepare programs that reproduce the errors and I shipped diskettes with instructions and documentation. My guess is that they went straight into the circular file. I have gotten patches for problems but it didn't happen becuase I sent in bug reports or paid my upgrade fee. It happened becuase I became a squeeky wheel which needed some grease (not too much mind you, but a little!). -- David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.uucp) | "Yea I've got medicine..." as the Beckemeyer Development Tools | cookie cocks a his Colt, "and if 478 Santa Clara Ave, Oakland, CA 94610 | you don't keep your mouth shut, I'm UUCP: {unisoft,sun}!hoptoad!bdt!david | gonna give you a big dose of it!"
plocher@uport.UUCP (John Plocher) (07/17/88)
I am now the manager of Customer Support, a position I have held for only a week now. This reply is based on what I have learned in the three weeks I have been working for Microport. +---- In article <351@bdt.UUCP> David Beckemeyer writes: | +---- In article <17124@sgi.SGI.COM> Vernon Schryver asks: | | Are Microport 'Hotline Support' or 'Upgrade service' worth it? | | If I send a bunch of bug reports to Microport, what good will it do | | me? Will I get fixes or patches? Are updates frequent, with lots of | | fixes? ... | +---- | The answer is NO. There are ways to deal with Microport but buying | their services is not the most effective. Things I've learned since I got here: All bug reports are investigated. The more detail, the more in depth the investigation. If hardware configurations permit, the bug is verified here in tech support. The bug is assigned a classification - roughly the areas are o - Fatal to the operation of the system o - Fatal to the program being run o - Documentation o - Incorrect operation o - Feature requests o - CPU limitations (64K segments...) and, of course o - Pilot error (remember the spate of flames last year about how Microport's printf() was broken because printf("%s", (char *) NULL); caused a core dump?) The bug is then assigned a priority and a schedule for fixing it. This schedule depends on priority, number of customers affected, the presence of a viable work around, marketing, and a host of other factors. | Who nees Hotline Support when the switchboard operators can't even | transfer the calls? Even if you do get through to somebody after We are busy. From 10 to noon and from 1:30 to 3 CA time. Even so, there shouldn't be a problem with our switchboard. People with installation problems and those with support contracts are transfered to support, those without are told that they need a support contract. If you are reporting a bug, just tell the person on the phone and you will be transfered. The problems we are handling are evenly divided between installation questions (getting Unix up on yet another new mix of hardware) and what can best be described as technical hand holding - people who are trying to write programs who are just learning Unix and the limitations of the 286. (or the freedoms of the 386 :-) | several calls, they seldom can offer much help with real problems (unless | you have the "is the power turned on?" type problems, which I doubt). It's | cheaper and faster to figure out solutions yourself. I wish these were the only problems people called in with. It would make both my and my staff's job so much easier. This last week I was called upon to figure out why News 2.11 wouldn't install (what do you mean "You need to edit localize.sh"?), debug an interface to a Mux (be sure you set both the MIN and TIME fields in termio.c_cc), figure out why the serial ports on a customer's new machine didn't work (His hardware manual was wrong) and lastly I had someone who was upset because he couldn't fit DOS and Unix into a 10Mb laptop with 640K of memory! If you have a problem installing our product on your hardware, we will do our best to get you up and running. If you have bug reports, feature requests, or gripes, send them to us (email or US mail + example code or a description of how to reproduce the error is best, phone reports are also accepted). If you have a support contract, you can call us on the support number and either myself or my staff will help you. If you don't have a support contract with us (and your problem isn't one pertaining to installation) then you need to contact your salesperson about getting one. | I bought the upgrade contract. I guess I got what I paid for but I think | one could get anything I got *without* buying the upgrade service. The upgrade service IS NOT a support contract. These are two different things. The upgrade contract gets you at least 2 major upgrades and up to 10 minor updates for free (see section 3 of the contract). The support contract gets you everything in section 6 (Phone support...). | As for bug reporting. I have sent in quite a few. I even went so far | as to prepare programs that reproduce the errors and I shipped diskettes | with instructions and documentation. My guess is that they went straight | into the circular file. I went through the disks that Henry gave me and your's didn't seem to be there. Email me with particulars, *please*. I do have on file several disks from people - just none with your name on it. | I have gotten patches for problems but it didn't happen becuase I sent | in bug reports or paid my upgrade fee. It happened becuase I became a | squeeky wheel which needed some grease (not too much mind you, but a little!). I can't speak for those who were here before me, but I will try my hardest to make sure that you don't have to be a squeeky wheel to get answers and solutions. Those of you who know me from Usenet days of times past will find that I still don't like bullshit - on either end of the phone. If you can't get a satisfactory answer to your problems, let me know about it. As always, feel free to email. -John Plocher Customer Service Manager Microport Systems, Inc plocher@uport uunet!uport!plocher
karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (07/22/88)
My use of Microport System V/AT (286) is on the decline, as we're moving to a 386 and, to say the least, it has been a frustrating experience running it these last two years. While I haven't always found Microport's tech support to be that great, they recently saved my butt when I trashed my hard drive's partition end record (by entering bad CMOS-RAM drive types - can you believe it?) and had only a month-old backup. They were very helpful and provided technical information that was essential to restore it. Half the problem of restoring the partitions, though, was that the divvy released with 2.3 was compiled with the wrong include file, causing me to be unable to get to two of the three partitions on the second drive. Nonetheless, I couldn't have done it without them, and is was a favorable experience. The thing that I think most infuriated me during the two-year experience was the claim in the 2.3 release notes that filesystem size problems had been fixed and filesystems could be safely built up to around 131071 blocks. Unfortunately, fsck had bugs that trashed filesystems bigger than (as far as I can tell) 65535 blocks, even when the filesystems were OK. I lost my filesystems because of this. Now that I'm running a competitor's 386 Unix, I am beginning to see that Microport inherited a lot of bugs from AT&T. For example, uucico with -x4 causes uucico to dump core on the 286 and hang, weird out or dump core on the 386...doubtful that uPort caused it. Also, the 286 is brain-damaged, tho' I've heard that SCO Xenix has far fewer problems (too expensive for me, I'm afraid.) -- -- backups: always in season; never out of style. -- karl@sugar.uu.net aka uunet!sugar!karl