Don't Ask, BASH the "Experts"

[deanwebb]

Vendor is having a hell of a time getting his network device to work. After five hours of struggle, he calls me over to say that he's found the problem.

The vendor tells me I have a bad port on my switch. That's why he didn't get a connection for the last five hours.

"Really" says I.
"Yes" says he as he then says, "See, when I plugged into this port here, the link light came on. I didn't get it with the other port, over here." He then takes the cable and plugs it into the switch.

The cable makes that "tink" sound to let one and all know that it's all the way in.

The link light comes on. 

"Huh" says he.

"Well, whichever port works is fine with me, just so long as it's ready for testing" says I as I mentally make note that if this guy is a vendor expert, I'd hate to have to call in to their first-line support... 

[deanwebb]

Another vendor was having a hell of a time with getting his gear to set up in high availability... I find this unusual, since I was on the phone with him in a WebEx when he walked me through getting stuff set up for HA. Last thing he told me was to power off the secondary unit. I went to the one that had the .2 address and pulled the plug on it, like he told me to do. The .1 unit was up and and waiting for a few more settings to be set before bringing up the second unit.

A few days later, the vendor guy comes to our site and makes complaint about how HA isn't working. My boss and I come to the conference room where he's set up and ask what's up. Vendor guy then says to me, "I think I know what's wrong. You turned off the primary unit."

Wow. Way to throw me under the bus in front of my boss, thereby endearing me to your brand forever. My response comes quickly, but without anger. "No, I turned off the secondary unit. You talked me through the config on the .1 box and that's the one you're logged into, right?"

My boss leans over and confirms that he's logged into the .1 box. This vendor guy had told me in the WebEx, "Some vendors show up with pre-configured gear, but I like to sell how easy this product is to use, so I'll let you drive." I had given him the chance to do all the clicking himself to get things done right, but it seems like it was more important to him to have me do all the work so that he could blame me if he couldn't figure out his own product.

After the vendor guy says, "Huh," he says nothing more and hits his product's documentation. A few hours later, he's flattened both boxes, started over, and has them in HA.

I was pleasantly surprised that he got that HA set up, since this guy also forgot that we had changed the default admin password from a null entry to "password."

[wintermute000]

Niche/specialist product vendor 'experts' are the worst. They are usually so single vendor siloed that they have no idea of the world outside of their own narrow CLI syntax or specific platform behaviour.
I remember sitting through a netscaler course then having to teach the bloody teacher the difference between L2 and L3, which is kinda important when you are flogging a L7 aware application gateway i.e.. fancy load balancer

This obviously does not apply to a Cisco, Juniper, Brocade etc. engineer

[deanwebb]

I agree. An SE with a good, solid background in the systems his product connects to usually does a really good job, and Cisco has lots of those guys... although I have seen a flaky Cisco guy before... but the Cisco guy we have right now doing a demo was nice enough to take a firewall we thought we'd have to RMA and take it home with him to get it working over the weekend. Totally cool.