rob@hao.hao.ucar.edu (Rob Montgomery) (05/08/91)
PROBLEM SPECIFIC ---------------- > ... > If you want to talk to somebody in person about this, you can call our > customer service number: (303) 530-5200. Or feel free to send me email with > more details about your configuration, etc. and I'll try to help you over > this hurdle. > > Greg Holling > Precision Visuals, Inc. > boulder!pvi!greg Thanks for your letter! I wrote to this group *after* talking with people at the customer support number. I was told to get Sun patch number 100192-01 if running OpenWindows and SunOS 4.1.1. We currently run 4.1 though, and I was told to use "sunview -i" or contact Sun to see if they had a patch for that OS. Yes, let's communicate about this problem -- there is probably some simple solution! GENERAL ------- So far I have been plagued with problems getting PV~WAVE and Point and Click here and up. Some of the problems may be our fault, however I have also been given the impression that PVI is understaffed and overworked in some important areas that interact with the public (nothing new in the real world, huh? ;^). Have other people been having problems? Much of this may represent an isolated case. At this point I have to laugh at the sequence of events. - We ordered PV~WAVE and Point and Click for our Suns and SGIs, with a one-seat floating license. - I received one box with a tape and some documentation. - There was no packing list or anything similar, so never knew what was actually missing. (The Ohio Supercomputer Center sends a very nice list with their apE 2.1 package, for example.) - There were no installation instructions with the documentation. I thus hoped I could simply tar off the files and find further documentation there. - I tried to read the tape on our Suns, where our license managers were going to run. I kept getting checksum errors. I tried to read the tape on an SGI and was successful. - That was my clue that not all of the software I needed was on that one tape. I called CS (Customer Support) and was told by one person that we needed 4 tapes, and by another that we needed 3 (3 turned out to be right). CS also had documentation sent (unfortunately I then received a VMS Installation Guide rather than Unix). Also, I had not received softkeys, and found out they had not been generated yet, so they did so. - I then got a second tape in the mail, but no third. I called again to ask where the third tape was. I was told to find a demo tape previously sent to another person in my division months ago. - I tried to follow the installation notes to install for both the Suns and SGIs. Unfortunately, they didn't tell how to properly install for multiple architectures under a one-seat floating license. I called CS and was told to make a subdirectory in our Sun hierarchy and put some of the files from the SGI tape there. - Our softkeys were based on a primary server and a backup one. I found out that if both servers weren't up and both running the license manager, nothing would work. I called CS, who called CA and got back to me that a "quorum" of the servers have to be up for anything to work, i.e., over 50% of them. Thus having two servers is ridiculous, but three may be better than one. Anyway, I have been given new softkeys that use three license manager servers. I will try again. My intent here is not to flame PVI or their software, but I've been given a negative impression. It appears that things aren't as organized and coordinated as they could be at PVI, that there is a lack of communication between departments, that the Customer Support Engineers are too busy answering the phones to learn all they should to better field questions (a common problem for that type of position), and that documentation and other information sent to users needs improvement. I'm sure things will get better over time. :-) -Rob