Cisco does care

Recently I had a customer who went down hard on there Db replication.  It has been off prob for some time, but since they had multiple servers and no changes needed to be made the phone system just kept chugging away as usual.  Then when it had enough it just stopped working.  This customer also ended there support contract with us and called in a Sev 1 request willing to pay top dollar for a engineer to assist them.

In the 1st stages of troubleshooting I noticed that the DB replication was off.  I tried to resynch  through the CLI and no luck.  We rebooted a few boxes no luck.  Next I was thinking we may have some deeper rooted problems we should call TAC.  This feels like one of the times they may have to root into the system to get it fixed, or we can get cisco to possibly send you a new box or 2 if you have good backups. There last backup was last year in april, but thats another story.  So there only option was to get the boxes back up.


I called Tac with the serial numbers and they were no longer on support, but cisco does allow you to pay by credit card.  I spoke with the entitlement guy and he said since they were 100 percent down cisco would give you a 1 time free TAC call but urged support.  We got a tac engineer and just like I expected he had to root in and we got the boxes back up, but thats not the story.  I though cisco was going to hold their system for ransom for those credit card digits.   Just another odd day in the life of a engineer.


We will be talking about backups next!!!!!!!!!!!!

Network Plats PT3

After thinking about this, I didn't come up with a good solution.   In other words people are going to be people and its best as us who provide support should just take the higher road, and let things go.   As we have learned customers are going to be upset which they should, but maybe with some coaching we can get them to deliver us what we need and keep the focus on problem resolution and let management deal with the attitudes.  While they are going to continue to say the silly things, I don't feel they can go away.  The part that I didn't mention earlier on is that I usually focus on the Tier2/3 level of troubleshooting, so I actually don't deal with non technical people.  I'm usually dealing with IT staff which is a reason for me beef as they know how things work.  Good luck out there.