[c-nsp] Cisco TAC successfully disappoints again

[Matthias Müller]

Hi,

i can understand your frustration because it fits in my/our experience with TAC even if sometimes there's really an internal security bug that will be addressed in an security advisory.

But my personal experience with TAC and Cisco in the last 3 years is like this, if we open a TAC case (mostly bug related or problems in very specific environments - about 6-8 TAC cases per year from us with about 3500 cisco devices, RMA stuff not counted in these 6-8 cases where we needed an ack from TAC for an RMA)

Top answers from TAC (feeled, I didn't count it):

- parity error/cosmic radiation - if it happens again, RMA
- not enough information for post-mortem, couldn't find a root cause - if it happens again, RMA

minority: we found a bug that matches your problem, that bug was fixed in $RELEASE

After our last outages and increasing the pressure on our AM, escalating inside Cisco even more with our CTO, these answers changed from TAC:

- we don't recommend an RMA, because that might get you to the impression that there is a hardware problem with SUP720-3C

so suddenly, it's not a hardware problem anymore....

after we escalated even further, we got an ack from cisco for 5 days of professional servives to investigate our problems...their answer was: we can't find any design flaws and no root-cause, but we advise you to move away from $THATTECHNOLOGY and they told us that we're on the same knowledge-level regarding a setup like that

we showed them our exit-plan for %THATTECHNOLOGY plan we had for more than one year and asked to look over it and advise us regarding recommended images...

The answer was frustrating from professional services: well, we can't advise you on a recommended image, for that we need to evalutate your used features and so on. But use latest stable, but we cannot give you our approval seal for that...

Next step was even more frustrating: if you want more of us we can offer you our constand professional services with a dedicated engineer that helps you with network design, security updates, EoL/EoS reports (after they ackknowledged, that we're on the same level of engineering, design and hardware knowledge of their products) for nearly the same fee we pay currently for our 6 tac-cases a year (at our network replacement parts is always best effort because we have spare-parts for everything).

We talked to them again and said: most of those parts you offered we got with our presales SE before for free. Answer was: well, that wasn't his job...IMHO post-sales is pre-sales if you don't aim for a one-time project offer...

My personal advice for all networkers is:
- always have more than one vendor in your setup
- rely on standards where it's possible and they exist
- re-evaluate every year whether your current vendor still is without alternatives


Executive summary: cisco is the dominant vendor, cisco is arrogant, don't expect support. don't expect support from other vendors either. but keep at least two vendors in your network to have something to put pressure on one vendor

Cheers,
Matthias

On Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:49:28 -0500
Joe Maimon <jmaimon at ttec.com> wrote:

> What exactly does Support mean? I just cannot believe the following fits 
> the definition.
> 
> Hello Joe,
> 
> My name is J*** C**** and I’m the manager of the Routing Protocols team 
> within Cisco TAC. I’m contacting you on behalf of J*** M***** who is the 
> owner of this SR.
> 
> After reviewing the case notes, I understand that you’re hitting a known 
> bug and J*** was able to share with you some details of it as it is an 
> internal bug. Due to this situation, we can not disclose any additional 
> details as we can’t go against our policies, what I would like to 
> suggest is in case you have an account team, feel free to contact them 
> directly so they can help you with this request.
> 
> Feel free to contact me in case you have any other concerns, and also 
> please let us know how to proceed with this SR.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> J**** C****
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