On Sun, Apr 08, 2001 at 11:22:38PM -0500, Bob Tanner wrote: >How can you help? > >But if you could send me your horror stories with VA, I'd like to include them Sistina bought a 16 Node VA cluster so we could do some GFS testing as well as incorporating a VACM STOMITH method. It came with RH6.2 installed (VA Improved) a few months ago one of the machines slowed WAY down. With no load it would take top 5 seconds to start. Another machine wouldn't recognize one of the processors. Tom and I did some poking around and figured (Well Tom did all the figuring) out that it was a motherboard issue. I took the steps on VA's site to get tech support, the web-mail form, sent mail to everyone I could think of. So for almost a month our 15 node cluster was decimated by 2 nodes. (When you have the cluster shared between 4 developers this hurts) Finally an associate of ours called some of the Top Brass at VA (Friends of his) and rattled thier cage. It was at this point that they had some damn lackey call me and try to do the whole "You're a stupid user" tech support drill. I emphatically told him "The motherboards are bad, I want two new machines here within the week" after two more weeks of endless bickering with them they aquiesced and sent out a tech. Some PC Repairman who knew nothing about linux, VACM, ServerWorks(TM) Motherboards or anything else. I had to show this llama how to put the processors in. They called to ask how it went and I told them that we didn't pay for our support to come from the lowest bidder, we paid for VA service. Meaning a VA employee with knowledge of VACM, Linux, and thier specific HW should have came out to do the work. It took me an additional two days to get the VACM stuff working again (It's not hard once you know where to look and how to set the BIOS up) When we overpaid for the hardware we got from them in the first place just to support such a fine company I would have thought they'd do us better than that. Furthermore they sold us this great and holy cluster with the attitude "This is what we do best" it toook them 3 months to get it ready at which point they told us "We don't really know how to do this sort of thing" and that we were guinea pigs! Guinea Pigs!! You don't wanna know how much money we spent on 16 SMP x86 boxes...... Then to tell us we were guinea pigs. Then they had the nerve to expect Sistina to tell everyone how great VA's clusters are. I too want the old VA back. Go get em Bob. To VA's credit, once they realized that it was "Sistina" who was having the problem they rolled out the corporate ass-kissing machine BIG TIME! I got to the point were I said "Stop calling me, the service call was last month!! and No we may never buy anything from you people again" -- Ben Lutgens cell: 612.670.4789 Sistina Software Inc. work: 612.379.3951 Code Monkey Support (A.K.A. System Administrator) $chown -R us.us yourbase -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20010409/7a034f95/attachment.pgp