Everybody Resolves this Domain but Us.

[Pete Ehlke]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 09:34:06AM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 
> 	My sincere thanks to all of you on this list.  When
> situations like this arise, there is lots of finger-pointing and
> table pounding and "You need to fix this now!" type talk.  Your
> answers have given me more backing in my response which is
> basically that I have written to the contact addresses and we
> can't do much more because it isn't us that is broken even though
> it looks that way.
> 
Well, you're in a university environment, so finding the right local
resource might be a little trickier for you than it typically has been
for me in the past, but here's what I usually do in this situation:

If there is a genuine *need* for connectivity to the remote site (and in
your case, where students are engaged in legitimate commerce, or in
Chris' case earlier, where the remote site is actually a customer, there
certainly is such a need) and you have exhausted all means to contact a
technical resource on the remote end, then it's time to bring out the
big guns. Go to someone with clout in your sales organization, explain
the problem and what you have done to try to fix it, and ask that she
contact someone with clout in the remote site's marketing organization.
I've never once seen this fail. If someone in sales tells someone in
marketing that a trivially fixable technical error is losing money for
both sides of the deal, that error tends to get fixed rather quickly.
Granted, you just ruined the remote sysadmin's day, but then she sort of
brought it on herself, didn't she?

Perhaps someone in your university's telecoms office could help you.
University students are a fairly lucrative market for long distance
resellers...

As sysadmins, we too often ignore the 8th layer of the OSI model. It
*can* be used to our advantage ;)

-Pete