this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Keep in mind that the service lines also deal with customers who can’t distinguish a CPU from a modem from a monitor. Hence the basic troubleshooting in the beginning.
I always start off by telling them "I know what I'm talking about, I work in IT, let's skip the basics, I've tried it all already." but they sometimes still don't listen.
Years back, I bought an Asus workstation motherboard with IPMI, the stupid BMC would reliably crash every 12 hours rendering the IPMI absolutely useless since it would hang upon login. I emailed support and told them that the BMC sucked and asked if they had an internal build I could try... They directed me to the downloads page and told me to download the UEFI firmware 🤦♂️ It took about SIX back and forth emails over the course of a week or so to get them to understand that I was talking about the BMC and not motherboard itself. Their tier one and two support had ZERO clue what a BMC or IPMI was. After begging them to forward me to an engineer who actually knew what I was talking about, they agreed and that engineer sent me an updated build...which still crashes every 12 hours 🤦♂️. In the end my solution was to set a cron job (I run Linux) to execute every 11 hours that logged into the IPMI from the running OS and did a cold reset on the BMC. That worked like a charm as long as Linux was running.
They don't listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there's probably at least three people who don't have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they're an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
I agree that “I work in IT” gives off “I want to talk to the manager” vibes.
Since when is "let's skip the basics" asshole vibes? It's a waste of time for them and myself to cover all the basics, which I've already gone through.
"did you check the power cord?", " did you reboot it?", "Is it actually on?"
Yes, I'm not tech illiterate. We don't need 5 back and forth emails over the course of a few days to get down to something helpful. Give me the helpful stuff up front. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive and these support people are costing companies a lot of money due to unnecessary downtime. I used to work for Disney+ and we had servers that died all the time, we'd email Dell or SuperMicro and tell them what the issue was, and then we would spend days or weeks of back and forth doing things we already tried, or things we know wouldn't fix the issue before they finally decide "ok let's replace it". A few times their suggestions even bricked our servers and made the problem worse! We'd say that there was a CPU issue on a server that started crashing and the IPMI logs and Linux itself would point to a faulty CPU or RAM. They told us to flash a new EFI, we would do so, and great now the server doesn't power on at all instead of just crashing occasionally.