[Madlug] OT:email troubleshooting help

[William Lorman]

I have to side with Darrick here. I often have as many or more problems 
when the folks who supply our Canon and Sharp machines do not make 
contact as they should or do not know how mail, DNS and other things 
work and especially understand how a system might have a particular 
configuration because of it's place in a wide area network or role in a 
document management system. The staff tied to the document management 
apps are usually good and many support technicians do indeed know to 
contact the right people so I am not categorically slamming people.

At two sites I mange the mail servers actually have logging that can 
help troubleshoot problems and each office or segment has a host with 
tools to troubleshoot common Layer 1-7 problems. 

I will concede that staff at a site can easily hurt too.

You can always have a VM on your laptop with a mail server and the tools 
needed to the troubleshooting too.

Good luck!

matt wrote:
>
> The point where I usually get involved in these issues is after the 
> machine or software has been setup. It's often been working fine for 
> months or years but "all of a sudden" stopped working. Someone changed 
> something and 9 times out of 10 it wasn't the person I'm talking to. 
> Most of the customers I work with either have a consultant that they 
> would have to pay to have come in, were free and usually faster, or 
> their IT people are unresponsive and they would rather not get them 
> involved. In both cases its almost always faster and easier if we just 
> jump in and fix it. Usually a quick look at their network settings and 
> an nslookup will get a machine going again. Other times its spam 
> software or some other weird issue that having a log would help diagnose 
> whose issue it is and what needs to be done to fix it. Which is all I 
> care about. Whether I can fix it or not, sometimes I just need to have 
> proof one way or the other of whats going on to make the customer happy. 
> I'm more than happy to work with an admin, but many times they don't 
> even care to get involved. Thats why I'm talking to an end user in the 
> first place.
>
> Matt
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