[AusNOG] Cisco Support & RMA/Replacement Feedback

[Damien Gardner Jnr]

On 01/03/2009, at 12:25 AM, Greg M wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Does anyone here have any feedback on the Cisco RMA / Replacement  
> process?
>
> We have a Cisco ASA 5510 device under a 24x7x4 Service Contract, and  
> after the ASA crashed and failed to reboot an RMA was raised on  
> Friday. A new device was shipped from Sydney as there was no Stock  
> in Perth and it arrived at 2pm today.
>
>  We have just raised a second RMA for the 5510 and the Engineer at  
> Cisco advised there was no more stock in Australia and they would  
> have to ship some in from overseas which could take 2 days.

I've had performance on both ends of the scale - our first RMA was  
back in 1999 on the 2501 running our BPD DDS link.  Something  
(couldn't tell you what, now) died, and they didn't have a replacement  
in .au, so we were told 'its on its way from the US...'  This was  
around 10pm on a friday night.  Some frantic running around the other  
ISP's in canberra, got us a spare 25xx, and we were back in business  
for the meantime.  about midnight saturday night/sunday morning, I get  
a call on the mobile from a very american sounding dude from cisco  
going 'Im at canberra airport, can you meet me at your office?'.  Yup,  
they'd flown a bloke out with the replacement parts, and he came in,  
fixed the unit, and waited while we dropped our configs on and  
switched it back into service and made sure it came up..  We were  
pretty darned impressed!  I gave him a lift to the airport on my way  
home, and he apparently just waited there till his flight home..

Our second RMA (attempt) was back in 2005, on an 877 which we'd *only*  
just bought, and which refused to have an MTU of anything other than  
1500 on its adsl interface - it wasn't picking up the lower MTU from  
iinet, and if you manually set it, you simply had no data flow across  
the link.  Went to raise an RMA, and was told our contract hadn't been  
fully processed yet, but the fellow in the canberra office who had to  
deal with it, as we were a canberra company, was on holidays and it'd  
just have to wait till we got back..  Ended up with a lunix box  
between the 877 and the rest of our border to force the MTU down.   
Never did hear back from cisco (despite lots of left messages and  
emails) in the three months before the company folded..

Cheers,

DG

Damien Gardner Jnr
VK2TDG. Dip EE. GradIEAust
rendrag at rendrag.net -  http://www.rendrag.net/
--
We rode on the winds of the rising storm,
  We ran to the sounds of thunder.
We danced among the lightning bolts,
  and tore the world asunder

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20090301/fd93773b/attachment.html>