Network Support Blues Revisited

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Network Support Blues Revisited

By Sean Gallagher
Issue date: Nov. 18, 1996

Good vendor technical support is hard to find. Finding good, free vendor technical support is close to impossible. The days of the free installation support number, it seems, are over at almost every major software company.

As a reviewer, I have an edge over most users--vendors want to make sure that their products work in the InformationWeek Labs, so they give me as much free technical support as I can stand. But sometimes I get to see the world like a real user--and it isn't pretty.

Take for example the NetWare 4.11 installation I just finished. I recently became the proud owner of a pair of Hewlett-Packard NetServer LH Pro systems. They arrived as they would for a real user--unconfigured with the extra memory and hard drives in separate boxes. HP's installation documentation and utilities are great, so I had both systems up in half a day.

My tale of woe began when I set about installing the operating systems. The NetWare installation crashed before it even got started. A quick call to HP's free--but not toll-free--technical support corrected some potential interrupt-sharing problems, but for an inexplicable reason, the installation program wouldn't copy CDROM.NLM from the installation CD-ROM to the server's hard drive. There was no explanation in the quick-start docs, and I suspected the CD was bad.

I dialed Novell's toll-free support number, only to find out that there is no free installation support for NetWare 4.11, meaning that I either had to pay for a support PIN code or find an alternative source of support. After obtaining a PIN, I left a message describing my problem. I got a call back three hours later. Within minutes, the problem was uncovered: a weird bug in the NetWare installation that would not copy the CDROM. NLM file if there was a DOS device driver with the reserved name CDROM. The tech support person assured me that this was in the addenda provided to Novell's platinum dealers--but not directly to end users.

This got me thinking: How many network administrators were on the phone at that moment, paying to find out about a bug in NetWare's installation? Probably as many as were paying to find out about the bugs in NT 4.0 and OS/2 LAN Server device drivers.

Once I changed the device name from CDROM to CDROM1, the installation went without a hitch. Of course, the NetWare client for NT 4.0 Workstation has crashed my administrative workstation three or four times now, but I downloaded that for free fro m Novell's Web site, so that's my own fault.

Sean Gallagher can be reached at sgallagh@cmp.com

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