[Info-vax] : Welcome to lockdown - HP limiting access to patches

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 11/8/2010 9:11 AM, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article<7a7f5bee-30e5-4569-9938-d9c2c86d12a8 at y23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>, Neil Rieck<n.rieck at sympatico.ca>  writes:
>>
>> In all this it was not my intention to give anyone a black eye. I only
>> wanted to share some of my experiences in case the same thing happens
>> to you.
>
>     Sadly, this is nothing new.  Although DEC did tend to know it's own
>     products, we fonud it very difficult to go through our annual
>     renewal of support contracts.  Nobody at DEC ever knew what we
>     already had on support, nor what we had bought since.
>

It wasn't just you!  DEC never had a clue what was supposed to go on a 
service contract and what not.  It didn't help much to get it right this 
year; next years contract was always loaded with hardware and software 
that we no longer had or never had!

My solution was to create a database listing the make, model, and serial 
number of ALL DEC/Compaq/HP hardware and software that I was responsible 
for.  Other fields included the line number on the service contract for 
each piece of hardware and each piece of software, the location of the 
hardware or software, etc.

I could go to my database and quickly identify stuff listed in the 
proposal that we no longer had or had never had!  It still took a few 
iterations to get it right but get it right we did!

For reasons I never understood, each year's contract renewal revived all 
the bogus entries.  Not a real problem because I KNEW what I had and 
wasn't about to pay DEC to support "phantom" hardware and software.