ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

Howdy! Summer is coming and that means the annual scramble to get your vacation days on the calendar. Actually vacations have already started; the emails are already flying around the group with TSEs making arrangements to have their "hot" cases, escalations and other responsibilities handled while they are out. So if you find yourself suddenly working with different engineer than you started with, know that this is how we keep everything covered AND allow our team members some off time.

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The big staff reduction news is out and official. Of course this is causing some worry for all of us. We trust our management to not reduce the customer-facing positions, especially since we are "lean and mean" already, due to hiring freezes and normal attrition.

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Latest FAQs and call generators: The Sendmail vulnerability (Sun Alert 102262) that was fixed in early April still brings in the calls. The questions have shifted from the "when is the patch going to be available?" to "why does loading the patch change or break my configuration?". The customers most affected seem to be those who are using custom configurations and/or not using the .mc files to create sendmail.cf. . . . . . The newest Ethernet interfaces [10 GigE, e1000g, nge, etc.) are also prompting customers to pick up the phone (or open a online web case). The questions there about kstat output; what options to use modify the device parameters like speed, duplex, and flow control; and inquiries about performance and what expections should be (free advice/tool recommendation: autonegotiation is the STANDARD. TTCP is a very functional free tool to measure ethernet throughput). . . . . More and more Solaris 10 questions are coming in, especially regarding the management of network services with SMF and the myriad ways that customers attempt to use, modify and manage the networking components in local zones.