Sun/Solaris contract support
SunSolve Online: http://sunsolve.sun.com/
"Sunsolve Online contains information for diagnosing and resolving problems with your Sun hardware and software. It contains proactive alerts for avoiding problems before they happen, and it provides helpful hints and guides for getting the most out of your Sun hardware and software. SunSpectrum Contract customers have access to the [whole shebang]." -- SunSolve website
Sun support: 1-800-872-4786
Before calling, have your contract number, any customer ID and PINs and the server serial number available.
Sun hardware vs. software support
"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." -- Rudyard Kipling
Substitute the word "hardware" for East and "software" for West in the above quotation and you'll get an idea of how Sun handles those two aspects of support. You will get tracked into one or the other when you call for support. You need to be clear about whether it's a hardware or software problem prior to calling. If in doubt, start with software support.
IBM/AIX contract support
IBM support: 1-800-426-7378
Online Tech Support:
http://techsupport.services.ibm.com/
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News Groups
The information available from news groups (and listservs) can run the gamut from "insightful and helpful" to "irrelevant and inaccurate." Ultimately, it's your responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaff.
listservs
Listservs tend to have a more narrow focus than news groups and may be restricted to a certain audience. Many offer a searchable archive.
Unofficial IT Support Portals
I'm not particularly recommending any of these, just letting you know that they are out there.
Example: Search Solaris [note: defunct]
Friends and colleagues
It's always a good idea to network with the other Unix sysadmins on campus, as well as people you meet in Unix classes and at user group meetings.
These people are often willing to help you if you ask.
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Asking for help story #1
When we bought a new Sun server to replace the Ultra 2 that we were using for WebVoyage, I installed Solaris 8 as well tcp_wrappers and SSH. The system and network configurations and permissions were our standard. Other than the fact that this was the newest version of Solaris, I had done similar installation setups numerous times.
Except this time I wasn't able to login via SSH. Or to telnet in or ftp.
What was different? Solaris 8. During the OS installation, I had chosen to install IPv6 and I suspected that that was causing a problem with the tcp_wrappers. Even though I had a good idea what the problem was (which is 90% of the solution), I didn't know how to fix it. Since it involved the interaction of the OS with open-source (i.e. unsupported) software, I decided that my best bet was one of the Solaris newsgroups.
Many, many sysadmins had installed Solaris 8, and a lot of them probably also use tcp_wrappers.
So I searched comp.unix.solaris for recent postings on "tcp_wrappers" and found out that indeed there was a conflict and that the fix was an IPv6-enabled version of tcp_wrappers that had recently been released. A couple of messages gave a URL for downloading the new version.
First moral of the story: News groups are the best bet for open-source software questions.
Second moral of the story: It's good etiquette to do a search of a news group and/or list archive before posting a message.
Asking for help story #2
One afternoon, WebVoyage first slowed to a crawl and then stopped. The rest of Voyager was soon to follow...
[Hey, you had to attend the session to hear all the stories!]
Moral of the story: Tell the support person everything that may be relevant to fixing the problem.
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