Of ponies and network hardware

[altivo]

First the good part. Asher is much better this evening. Evidently the additional medication and washing his hay have made a difference. The cough continues, but he's breathing normally again. He's still on hydroxyzine morning and evening, but also gets 2 ml of clenbutyrol (I think I spelled that right, it's an asthma medication) in syrup form morning and evening. He doesn't like it much, but he's so well behaved that it's not a problem yet. He's also supposed to get a small dose of dexamethasone (a steroid type anti-inflammatory) but only once a week because it can cause laminitis. We don't need that. If he stays this much improved on the other two drugs, we may be able to omit the dex. With any luck, by the time cold weather comes around we'll be able to stop soaking the hay. That's going to be a real problem in sub-zero weather.

Unlike Asher, I'm a wreck. I worked twice my normal day today trying to get the Watchguard thing to behave, and failed. On the advice of other Watchguard users, I upgraded the appliance software and the control software. This made it necessary to rebuild the entire configuration from scratch because they provide no means to translate the existing config file to the newer format. I checked and rechecked everything, but now we are worse off than we were before.

The IPSEC connection no longer activates at all, from either end. Neither end provides any helpful error messages either. The best I get is "SA deleted or negotiation failed." No shit, Sherlock. So how about telling me WHERE it failed? Or WHY? Or which end rejected the attempt?

Finally I convinced the network admin at the other end to let us run the link in the clear for a day or two until this can be resolved. Only then I find out that the primary application for which the link is needed will no longer run. It was working on the old version, but the new version is killing its connection because the "http/tcp header does not match content". This appears to be coming from the HTTP proxy, except I didn't activate an HTTP proxy. I don't want one, don't need one, and in any case, the application has nothing to do with web servers or browsing.

Although the upgrade instructions tell you to back up your configuration files and your hardware image (which of course I did, in two places) they give you not a clue on how to return to the previous configuration if the new one doesn't work properly. It appears not to be possible. The installation routine that would install the old image can no longer talk to the firmware in the box now that the new image is in place. Thanks, Watchguard. So we have a situation that is worse than it was before. The link that worked mostly on the old version but would go down unexpectedly without explanation no longer works at all.

I'm totally fed up with it. They're going to have to call in a specialist to make it work, if that's even possible.

Then to top it all off, I find a comment in Monday's post from a product manager at Watchguard, asking me to call him to discuss my complaints. So once you start giving them bad publicity, even in a really obscure place like a furry blog, they notice it. But when you try to pry information out of their support services, for which you pay substantial money each year, there's nothing forthcoming.

Comments

[brokkentwolf.livejournal.com]

At the risk of extending your already long day, I should ask you about some /dev/mapper issues I'm having. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. I probably don't have an answer because I don't even recognize /dev/mapper. What is it? (I mean, obviously it's a UNIX/Linux/BSD device of some sort, but what?)

The linuxfurs group might be able to help more than I can.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

/dev/mapper is a component of the Logical Volume Manager (LVM), and is often used for configuring DM-Crypt, a filesystem encryption mechanism.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if Brokken needs to talk to you. :D

I checked. No /dev/mapper on my system, and you confirm it because I don't use LVM and certainly don't use filesystem encryption.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

The fact that Watchguard is watching blogs for negative comments speaks poorly of them. In my experience, companies that are as attentive to negative publicity as that are often trying to cover up their incompetence.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I had the same thought, though I didn't say it out loud. A colleague had a similar experience when she commented negatively on a library software product a few months ago. The sales/publicity team were eager to set her right. However, what she said is true, and the product simply doesn't deliver what it promises.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Could they also be looking for feedback considering most unsatisfied customers never tell the company what's wrong or it simply doesn't get past the initial call centre buffer that so many companies have.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Seems hypocritical to me: hide behind blind forms and "first line support" so that no one can get feedback to you if they have it, and then act all hurt when they say in public that your product isn't well supported.

Maybe I should blog about some of the other companies that I think are just as bad or worse: Microsoft, TrippLite, APC, Sirsi/Dynix...

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Not all companies do that but..
Well if they're anything like the place where my housemate works they use front line staff to buffer the complaints. But they're middle manager heavy and each tries to do things to justify their existance in the company. Hence a lot undertake management fads, and pretending to "listen to the client to help improve future products" sounds just like something they'd pull.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

APC? Don't they make UPS products as well?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

APC and TrippLite both make UPS products. Their support is crappy and their documentation is nonexistent. In fact, other than being larger and playing on a large market share and having been longer in the business, they are no better than CyberPower, another company that's on my sh*t list for the same reasons.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Our company bought 5 1500watt APC ups devices and all failed within warranty and during that time the product was no longer in stock or being manufactured so they gave a refund. We ended up being a german brand Leinheten or something similar, they've lasted very well, only just replaced the batteries in them :)

Crap UPSes

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's my APC experience too. The batteries are fine, but the control circuitry is extremely cheap and unreliable. Typically it fails, telling you to replace the battery, so if you believe it, you pay for a new battery and the unit still doesn't work.

TrippLite makes slightly better hardware in my experience, but they lie in their specs and advertising. For instance, they say the product is "Linux compatible" but it really isn't. They have Linux control and automated shutdown software, but it only works with RedHat version 6 (that's a long time out of date) and they aren't updating it. So the units are Linux compatible only in the sense that a Linux machine will still run if plugged into one. No automated shutdown is possible unless you have a Windows machine also connected, to trigger a remote shutdown command over the network. I complained loudly about this and was told "Tough." They have no intention of changing anything, and their control interface is "proprietary" so they won't release any information to let anyone else write control software. It has to be reverse engineered.

CyberPower is just cheap and cheesy. Their software is Windows only and not even good there. For one thing they deny that it tries to connect to the internet, but it does so. Every firewall we've used has detected it trying. No, it's not set to e-mail if the power goes off or anything. It tries to "phone home" every ten minutes while running. That means you can't have an internect connection on "auto-connect" in Windows XP because it will keep dialing out even if you aren't using the computer.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Amazing they found your post then issued a reply O.O
For what good it will do though.

As to that wonderful sounding hassle you're having I'm kind of glad I never became a network admin.

I'm sorry its been a bad day for you pony, I can only offer this bag of "Oaty treats" and this collection of shedded fur.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

It's not as though it's that hard to set up a "Google Alerts" account with the company's name as the trigger, though.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Hey thanks :) *scuttles off to have a look*

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be a little contrarian here and recommend you take the Watchguard guy up on his offer, for one reason: It's likely to be the best (maybe only) way to get your stuff up and running.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm too disgusted with Watchguard to give them the satisfaction. If their support people couldn't help, then I have no reason to believe a middle manager can. He just wants to keep me from saying bad stuff.

Last time I accepted an invitation like that, it did no good at all. They just offered to buy back the product, not to fix it or even do better in the future.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

By the way, it is up and running as of this afternoon. It was one option setting that had to be non-default, though neither Watchguard nor Cisco provide any accessible information on it. We had the tech consultant who handles a couple of the other libraries come in to look at my settings, and he reversed two of them. It came right up. One is now the opposite of what it was in the old software. I tried varying both, but never flipped them both at the same time.

I had written instructions from this same tech guy, but he omitted that particular setting so I had assumed the default was correct. It wasn't.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Freaky!

I wonder how they ended up finding your blog in the first place?

That's just weird.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh zetawoof probably has the answer above. Just Google. I'm not hidden from Google, and they have a notification thing that lets you know any time a selected keyword or phrase appears in any new entry.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

*nods* I hid my journal from search engines. Although, I'm pretty sure it's not actually hidden all that well.

Around the time of my eye surgery, someone I didn't know friended me for his journal that was to document surgical experiences. Somehow he was able to search through the text in my posts and found the one's I'd made about the surgery. He never did respond to my emails asking how he found me.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It could have been that LJFind thing. It seems to stay pretty current, though it doesn't catch Friends-only or private posts. Anything that is publicly readable seems to get into it.