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A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

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Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#52
Seems like a good place to mention this: I once was troubleshooting an Outlook issue where email stopped working after some time, seemingly at random. Turned out that Outlook picked up the IP address for the mail server backwards - so instead of WW.XX.YY.ZZ Outlook tried ZZ.YY.XX.WW. Found that by using sysinternals network tools, confirmed with Wireshark. Thunderbird worked, ping to the domain name (of the mail server) worked, Outlook worked on-and-off, ...

As it was MS Windows and I'm a Linux native I didn't really know how to investigate further - I guess I couldn't without Outlook source.

Luckily setting a hosts entry fixed it.

I only found one other post online with the same issue, and they didn't have a solution. Presumably it was something like ISP automated rDNS entries getting parsed .. but honestly I don't know.

Still curious ...

Would have loved to have found work investigating such things, as they said in the post, it's fun!

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a freshly provisioned VM doesn't have the same issue, then they're not using automated configuration management (Puppet, Chef, or similar) for these settings, and then they have a more serious problem, as nothing in their runtime environment is "codified" or predictable.

plenty of issues are not deterministic, even with 100% of everything managed by configuration management software.

But /etc/sysctl.conf is deterministic.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#54
“...This means that the case will Follow the Sun by default, to provide 24/7 support”

I love the concept of “Follow the Sun” to describe 24/7 support - I don’t think I’ve heard it described that way. I wonder how much we’d have to spend to get that tier of service?

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#56
post #28
post #17

Google support is basically non existent for customers even spending like 5-10K a month on their platform. Even questions you raise on their Reddit sub go unnoticed. They don't have bunch of people actively trying to solve their customers problem. That said the only time my problems were actually listed to were from BigQuery team. Other than this, I don't think it's possible to get any explanation on a feature from a…

Do you have a support plan?

Why should you need a support plan for a product you're paying for?

"Ok, you can pay us $X/mo for the service, but if something goes wrong, we won't help you unless you also pay an additional $Y/mo."

It's absolute garbage that this is where the industry is.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#57
I'm not an expert with AWS or Google Cloud, so I'm interested in knowing:

What "level" of customer or SLA do you have to be to get a certain quantity or guarantee of support and troubleshooting? Or is it that if even a free-tier customer points out something that is fundamentally a problem, it will receive attention by certain solutions engineers?

Are there $ spending, 20 x (c3.4x.large), or I-pay-you-for-certain-uptime/troubleshooting levels that get you certain response levels? Do certain problems get resolved with "well, you just have to live with that behavior, we're not fixing that".

Do you get to call them or chat live? Or is it all via tickets?

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#58

amazing. I wish I knew where to go learn the basics to navigate that many layers of knowledge (kernel/os/network)..

These books should help!

Computer Networks and Internet

Internet working with TCP/IP Volume III

The Linux Programming interface

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#59
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of my friend's hosting company that failed. They got a big customer and created a VM and the customer asked to fix a problem that involved getting a shell in the VM. Friend does it and the customer is gone next day. This aside, even though we had too many support cases so far with AWS, and having highest support level, they mostly cannot access user data, just the metadata. We had a major problem with R…

> It reminds me of my friend's hosting company that failed. They got a big customer and created a VM and the customer asked to fix a problem that involved getting a shell in the VM. Friend does it and the customer is gone next day. The customer asked the support people to access a shell on their VM and they then quit because...? - or the support people accessed a shell without the customer’s express permission?

I think it's because the support people even had the possibility of that access at all.

And I agree; support people shouldn't have that kind of access, with or without consent.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#60
post #14
post #13

Is Google Cloud support this good in general, or only for certain tiers or plans?

The only support for basic accounts is for billing

Even on platinum plans they are terrible in my experience. Endless pinballing of tickets and trying to blame issue on the customer. We had two day outage several times in my previous gig because google support refused to acknowledge the problems
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