bithead
Joined 17 years ago
Joined 17 years ago
Microsoft by far and away is the least responsive in nearly all cases. In one case the project involved thousands of SQL servers and MS was 100% unresponsive - moreover this was not a small customer, but one of microsoft's largest corporate customers. Still nothing but silence. So out with MS for that project. The yearly license fees were well into six figures. Even though MS has a track record of unresponsiveness, the silence was surprising and noteworthy. Why bet money on a horse that doesn't show up.
It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck.
It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
So I dug into packet captures and found that the switches were using all-zeros gratuitous arps to populate the forwarding table more quickly, which is a fairly common practice. The SQL servers saw this as in indication of a duplicate IP address (the garps were for 0.0.0.0).
Technically this did trigger the duplicate IP address detection RFC, but was never a problem for other server builds or any other server operational capacities. Cisco was the other vendor involved and came out with an update to allow for a timing delay for the all-zeros GARP. However given the timeline runway and the need to do a bug scrub for just one access area in a large data center with other much more lucrative capacity builds the only fiscally responsible thing was to look to the vendor at the heart of the problem.
However it was not possible to get any response from microsoft on it in spite of having the most expensive support contract they offered. The monthly late fees for the project were in the 8 figure range, so microsoft was dumped since they were not answering the phone. It was not for a lack of trying either. Our so-called "high touch" liaisons were equally frustrated.
It was weird since we were not a small customer - we were one of their largest. If a fortune 10 can't get microsoft to answer the phone, what hope does anyone else have?