Re: Fortra Support :-(

My father started repairing computes in 1967. Even then, computers worked weekends, and evenings, and holidays. Though, as you suggest, the most likely time to be able to take them apart, or upgrade, or migrate was weekends. In the 30+ years I did consulting, I knew that my weekends were not my own.

Being an FTE now with a team around me I still get to work weekends, but no longer all of them. :-)

I think it's very sad that a respected software company such as Fortra dings you painfully for non prime-time support. Yes I get it, IBM requires a fee as well but the cost to bring your Shwarma up from 8x5 to 24x7 is a small percentage and we sell that almost universally.

- DrF

On 12/10/2023 5:15 PM, Brad Stone wrote:

Hmm.. I support all my customers over the weekend. Probably transfer 5-10
licenses to new systems every weekend and other support issues as I know IT
folks like to work weekends when people are "using the system". Even
Christmas and New Years I have at least 2-3 support emails.

Lots of folks going to power 10s! :) And with a new system means new keys
and support issues like data areas/directories/etc and authorities. And
not to mention email delivery setup since they forgot what they had done
last time (normally CHGCMDDFTs).

My wife thinks I should take a vacation. I tell her "I do.. every night
with a glass of scotch, my guitar, and an episode of 'King of Queens'" (at
least that's the series I'm on now.. never watched it... it's really
funny... Stiller makes the show).

Brad
www.bvstools.com

On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 3:07 PM Roger Harman <roger.harman@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Went through the after hours support thing a few years ago when we did an
HA cutover. I, too, was surprised that the support was only weekday
business hours. I will say that the support was, as always with GA,
excellent once we agreed to the fee.

What really sucked was when we did the next cutover a couple of weeks
later and discovered that one of our admins had not made the permanent
change that GA told us to do to avoid the issue (license key overwrite)down
the road. Another $375 and we were good. Our own doing to shoot us in the
foot.

Roger Harman
COMMON Certified Application Developer - ILE RPG on IBM i on Power






-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Rob
Berendt
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2023 12:55 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Fortra Support :-(

I recently upgraded GoAnywhere. I had an issue where they had me do some
stuff with GASERVICES/JAVA_FONTS *DTAARA.
A new issue popped up this weekend after applying PTF's. It could not
access this data area.
Job . . : GASERVICES User . . : QPGMR Number . . . :
097496

CALL STRTOMCAT

Not authorized to object JAVA_FONTS in GASERVICES type *DTAARA.
Function check. CPF2189 unmonitored by STRTOMCAT at statement
0000002302,
instruction X'0000'.
CPF2189 received by procedure STRTOMCAT. (C D I R)

I tried to call support.
Apparently having to sign over your first born male child in support fees
isn't enough. To get them to work on it after hours requires a $375/hr
fee.
I refused to submit to this extortion.
I noticed that all the rest of the *DTAARA objects in this library were set
to *PUBLIC *CHANGE while this was set to *PUBLIC *EXCLUDE. I changed it to
*PUBLIC *CHANGE and took the R to retry the message.
This worked.
I made sure I can still get to my admin part and my user part.
All is good.
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