It is kind of telling how we accept that companies hide their support channels in every conceivable way and that this leads to random and arbitrary contact points sticking out more than the official ones.
I have actually gotten a few customers that way, when they couldn't get hold of the provider they just called whatever other provider existed and that happened to be us.
Me: "Sure we can fix it. Oh, you don't seem to be a customer. Maybe you called the wrong company?"
Non-customer: "Well, they don't answer, maybe you want to sell me the service instead?".
Calling someone who has no interest in the problem but helps anyway is definitely a way to make a friend for life.
I remember it happening to me once, I bought a house and I called a guy (turned out to be in maine) about a sauna since it had a name and a dead telephone number on it in my new house - he runs the same named sauna service on the east coast as I was looking for in the midwest and was the first result on google.
I thought it was a great time for him to bill me for a little consult, but instead he walked me through a sauna he had nothing to do with for 15 minutes on his cell phone and identified major features and areas to manage and maintain to someone who had no idea what was up.
Makes me want to move out to the east coast and build a sauna.
It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. The only people I can contact directly are authors of papers whose emails are still published in the papers. For everyone else, you would have to go through an intermediary (social media).
>It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online.
It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders:
We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots /
robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us.
E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.
> E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
For what it's worth, I've always had my email on my HN profile, and my email is also public + I'm pretty sure my phone number is public too after 2 decades of using it carelessly and also having it in my email signature.
I don't think I receive more spam emails/calls than anyone else. After entering a "no-spam" block list for my phone in Spain (Lista Robinson) I receive literally no spam calls anymore, and I get about ~30 spam emails per day it seems.
One useful perk of owning a domain is that I can now give a different email address to everyone. When they misuse, I can remove them from my inbox very easily.
On gmail when I have to give my email to a company, I give it out as myemail+theircompanyname@gmail.com, which is an alias for myemail@gmail.com.
In theory I could later use it to know which company gave out my email, but I also realize how easy it would be for the spammers to just remove the "+theircompanyname" part.
Sometimes sites must be using a crappy regex that won't allow the + though, even though it should be a valid character in email addresses.
You consider email to be without intermediary while social media is with one? Both have some sort of intermediary usually, but in the case of Mastodon (or ActivityPub in general) it at least uses a protocol, just like email.
Yes, traditional social media requires me to create an account on its website and jump through various hoops before I can contact the person. Social media is also geared towards broadcasting and will discourage you from DMing people. Mastodon is closer to email, but hardly anyone uses it.
Email also requires either an account at a service (with various levels of hoops) or setting up your own email (with even more levels of hoops), so judging by "hoop count", they're more or less the same?
Social media has terms of use that apply to everyone. This makes the social media operator an intermediatary who decides who you can and cannot talk to and what you may or may not talk about.
With email you get to choose your provider (or be your own provider) and in general providers are prety hands off. SPAM filters are a thing but you won't have your email account banned because of a single conversation. That makes email providers act more as facilitators than intermediaries.
If you're using Cisco products like this you have a support contract with them or one of their partners, so to get support you would open a ticket with them.
Access to their support portal is limited to the handful of people your IT department allows, and in the enterprise space it’s not uncommon for the Cisco people to be defensive about the products they recommended buying or dismissive of problems which aren’t critical or only impact platforms they don’t favor (often Linux or macOS).
How many organizations big enough to be using Cisco give all of their employees TAC accounts? This is the fundamental conflict with enterprise IT where the people making purchasing decisions aren’t bearing the brunt of the user experience, so the feedback loop for poor outcomes isn’t very effective.
Cisco could, of course, change that by allowing end users to report problems directly but they clearly don’t want to do that, which is how you end up with people emailing the author of curl because they can’t get support through a more obvious channel.
Why would they want end users, which they aren't even providing a service to and have no insight into, to contact them directly? 99% of calls would be we have no idea what's going on and have no ability to see or do anything, talk to your IT.
Your org is dysfunctional if users are unable to report things to IT that are then either fixed or investigated and forwarded to Cisco.
Most organizations are dysfunctional by your definition then. Problems which aren’t preventing people from working just aren’t going to get many people to slog through the Helpdesk escalation process to create a ticket, which saves Cisco on support staffing but also means that their software is never going to have as good of an experience as something built by a company which hears from its users.
Ever notice how consumer focused apps have easy ways to send feedback and enterprise apps usually don’t? That’s a function of who makes the decision to buy, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
I don’t like Cisco, but it’s a little much to blame them for your employer hiring and not firing support staff that are actively hostile to the people they are supposed to be supporting.
I don’t blame them for the common attitude problems in enterprise IT but it’s a symbiotic relationship. They avoid having to produce solid products with good UX by restricting access to report problems, and they help the gatekeepers stay in charge by telling the C-suite that networking is an unfathomably hard problem you can only solve by hiring people with lots of Cisco certifications.
As a simple example, the AnyConnect Mac client has a bug in the socket filter related to IP changes, which means that sometimes when the system wakes it’ll block connections for roughly 5 minutes until it times out and retries (or you kill the process). I would bet that this would be fixed in minutes if it affected Windows because most Cisco people use that and only begrudgingly support Mac or Linux desktops.
As a CCNP I think I can offer some insight into this phenomenon. I feel that it arises due to a few reasons:
1) CLI familiarity. Networking Professionals invest thousands of hours in learning router, switch, and firewall CLIs and want a return on this investment and this can only happen if their employer uses the equipment they are familiar with. If someone only knows the Juniper CLI then they will most likely have equal fervor for Juniper hardware. Having to use a CLI you are not familiar with adds stress to an already very stressful job.
2) Operational streamlining. Generally if every device on a Network is Cisco they will work together more reliably than if not. This isn't as true as it used to be but is still true. If your company network is Cisco only then Cisco cannot blame other manufacturers for an issue.
Personally I'm fine with having non-Cisco hardware. The Cisco Firewpower "next gen" firewalls are utter garbage compared to palo alto. My company has dozens of Cisco 2960 access switches and Cisco in their infinite wisdom has replaced this very cost effective product with the extremely NOT cost effective 9200 and 9300 series switches. If you only need gigabit ports and VLANs then the 9200 and 9300 switches are an incredible waste of money.
I'm forced to use Cisco AnyConnect to contact customer sites, but I'm about four levels of outsourcing removed from the folks who would actually have the golden keys to access the Cisco portal.
I have long ago accepted that small companies will react to your ticket in 30 minutes and deliver a fixed build in 2 hours, whereas sending bug reports to Cisco-sized corporations is about as effective as praying to the ancient gods
I used to “own” a port in /etc/services and got a few
Emails and somehow a very irate phone call from someone that was being port scanned. (Back when we had desk phones and they could call the company main number and asked to be transferred.)
There's something quite entertaining about what people who have absolutely no idea about all this "computing" thing sometimes do to show how clueless they actually are.
My favorite was the newly hired account manager for a web dev company whom the CEO found rummaging in the supply cabinet, looking for some URLs to show clients.
someone panicing over their job being terminated isn't very funny but the relief on someone's face when you explain that it's a computer process and not their livelihood is still something to see.
Not trying to be competitive, but over the years, my email flow along the lines of “My XML file isn’t working” (my email is on the front page of the spec) was occasionally um substantial. Sympathy.
I guess in principle Tim Bray would have been in a better position to help people figure out why their XML files aren't working than Daniel Sternberg would be to help people figure out why a Cisco product isn't working, though!
Hahah! That has happened with me too. I used to work on car infotainment systems in India's biggest automobile company. After the NDA cooled off, I added the work I did on my portfolio to apply for future roles. The thing we made was amazing (for that time 2015) as it allowed people with low-end infotainments with mono color displays to have navigation support using mobile.
People saw it on my blog and sent me service queries.
My company has a name that (if you squint really, really hard) can be confused with Logitech.
So naturally, I got a few questions on topics such as non working mice or keyboards, headphones and similar.
My usual reply lately (not that many, I can still bother to reply) is "This is not the Logitech you are looking for..." with the link to the company they want.
I worked for the CSIRO division of information technology. In pre widespread internet days people found me in the phone book and wanted information about technology: typically, the dangers if their Teflon saucepan had shed into their food.
AC is more that just a VPN client, it also can do network link authentication to switches... my biggest hell is when people's passwords expire, or get changed on another PC, which leads to PC's being knocked offline, broken network shares, and obscure error messages when applications can't access the network.
Poor guy. After being misidentified as a threat to the us, he's having to field support requests for a malicious company. (They made it hard for people to get support for their paid product)
I'm not sure it is that hard. If you type "Cisco anyconnect support" into Google, the first result is the support page with docs/community/contact options
To be fair, the curl license doesn't mention "curl" anywhere in it. It seems reasonable for someone to interpret "this software" as referring to the software product that includes the license.
"But Daniel," emailed Pagliacci, tears in his eyes, "I am the IT department"
Seriously the number of times I've seen companies lay off the only person who knew anything about X without realising they'd been dealing with problems with X for years and now that falls on a manager, a new hire, an intern...there's also people who don't know who to ask internally, or worse, feel like they can't ask internally because it will make them look incompetent.
Early in my career, the top nerd in the office knew all the answers, but delighted in being unremittingly rude and humiliating to anyone who deigned to ask him anything. That's the kind of behaviour that leads to people seeking any other channel for help. The best thing I learned from him was not to be like him.
This reminds me on how Spotify's bug bounty program keeps receiving vulnerability reports about Shopify, and how Shopify keeps receiving vulnerability reports from Spotify. This went so far that they had to explicitly put the other company's domain as out of scope on their bug bounty policy.
> This is the support email address you are looking for: ac-mobile-feedback@cisco.com
Thank you. I have a bunch of curl tech support questions, but didn't know who to contact.
https://curl.se/support.html
whoosh
Well played
Similar misdirection situation with "sqlite_" files and the attempt to obfuscate with "etilqs_" to redirect users to the offending software :
https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/33c120f9b7de84fb0dd262...
(commit dated 2006-10-31: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commit/fd288f3549a1ab9a309a...)
https://www.google.com/search?q=etilqs
It is kind of telling how we accept that companies hide their support channels in every conceivable way and that this leads to random and arbitrary contact points sticking out more than the official ones.
I have actually gotten a few customers that way, when they couldn't get hold of the provider they just called whatever other provider existed and that happened to be us.
Me: "Sure we can fix it. Oh, you don't seem to be a customer. Maybe you called the wrong company?"
Non-customer: "Well, they don't answer, maybe you want to sell me the service instead?".
Calling someone who has no interest in the problem but helps anyway is definitely a way to make a friend for life.
I remember it happening to me once, I bought a house and I called a guy (turned out to be in maine) about a sauna since it had a name and a dead telephone number on it in my new house - he runs the same named sauna service on the east coast as I was looking for in the midwest and was the first result on google.
I thought it was a great time for him to bill me for a little consult, but instead he walked me through a sauna he had nothing to do with for 15 minutes on his cell phone and identified major features and areas to manage and maintain to someone who had no idea what was up.
Makes me want to move out to the east coast and build a sauna.
It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. The only people I can contact directly are authors of papers whose emails are still published in the papers. For everyone else, you would have to go through an intermediary (social media).
>It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online.
It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders:
We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots / robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us.
E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.
> E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
For what it's worth, I've always had my email on my HN profile, and my email is also public + I'm pretty sure my phone number is public too after 2 decades of using it carelessly and also having it in my email signature.
I don't think I receive more spam emails/calls than anyone else. After entering a "no-spam" block list for my phone in Spain (Lista Robinson) I receive literally no spam calls anymore, and I get about ~30 spam emails per day it seems.
One useful perk of owning a domain is that I can now give a different email address to everyone. When they misuse, I can remove them from my inbox very easily.
On gmail when I have to give my email to a company, I give it out as myemail+theircompanyname@gmail.com, which is an alias for myemail@gmail.com.
In theory I could later use it to know which company gave out my email, but I also realize how easy it would be for the spammers to just remove the "+theircompanyname" part.
Sometimes sites must be using a crappy regex that won't allow the + though, even though it should be a valid character in email addresses.
You consider email to be without intermediary while social media is with one? Both have some sort of intermediary usually, but in the case of Mastodon (or ActivityPub in general) it at least uses a protocol, just like email.
Yes, traditional social media requires me to create an account on its website and jump through various hoops before I can contact the person. Social media is also geared towards broadcasting and will discourage you from DMing people. Mastodon is closer to email, but hardly anyone uses it.
Email also requires either an account at a service (with various levels of hoops) or setting up your own email (with even more levels of hoops), so judging by "hoop count", they're more or less the same?
Social media has terms of use that apply to everyone. This makes the social media operator an intermediatary who decides who you can and cannot talk to and what you may or may not talk about.
With email you get to choose your provider (or be your own provider) and in general providers are prety hands off. SPAM filters are a thing but you won't have your email account banned because of a single conversation. That makes email providers act more as facilitators than intermediaries.
If you're using Cisco products like this you have a support contract with them or one of their partners, so to get support you would open a ticket with them.
Access to their support portal is limited to the handful of people your IT department allows, and in the enterprise space it’s not uncommon for the Cisco people to be defensive about the products they recommended buying or dismissive of problems which aren’t critical or only impact platforms they don’t favor (often Linux or macOS).
Your organization being dysfunctional isn't really Ciscos problem.
How many organizations big enough to be using Cisco give all of their employees TAC accounts? This is the fundamental conflict with enterprise IT where the people making purchasing decisions aren’t bearing the brunt of the user experience, so the feedback loop for poor outcomes isn’t very effective.
Cisco could, of course, change that by allowing end users to report problems directly but they clearly don’t want to do that, which is how you end up with people emailing the author of curl because they can’t get support through a more obvious channel.
Why would they want end users, which they aren't even providing a service to and have no insight into, to contact them directly? 99% of calls would be we have no idea what's going on and have no ability to see or do anything, talk to your IT.
Your org is dysfunctional if users are unable to report things to IT that are then either fixed or investigated and forwarded to Cisco.
Most organizations are dysfunctional by your definition then. Problems which aren’t preventing people from working just aren’t going to get many people to slog through the Helpdesk escalation process to create a ticket, which saves Cisco on support staffing but also means that their software is never going to have as good of an experience as something built by a company which hears from its users.
So what do you expect Cisco to do for end users?
Ever notice how consumer focused apps have easy ways to send feedback and enterprise apps usually don’t? That’s a function of who makes the decision to buy, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
I don’t like Cisco, but it’s a little much to blame them for your employer hiring and not firing support staff that are actively hostile to the people they are supposed to be supporting.
I don’t blame them for the common attitude problems in enterprise IT but it’s a symbiotic relationship. They avoid having to produce solid products with good UX by restricting access to report problems, and they help the gatekeepers stay in charge by telling the C-suite that networking is an unfathomably hard problem you can only solve by hiring people with lots of Cisco certifications.
As a simple example, the AnyConnect Mac client has a bug in the socket filter related to IP changes, which means that sometimes when the system wakes it’ll block connections for roughly 5 minutes until it times out and retries (or you kill the process). I would bet that this would be fixed in minutes if it affected Windows because most Cisco people use that and only begrudgingly support Mac or Linux desktops.
Few vendors attract the fervor that network dudes carry for Cisco. It’s a weird and unique phenomenon.
As a CCNP I think I can offer some insight into this phenomenon. I feel that it arises due to a few reasons:
1) CLI familiarity. Networking Professionals invest thousands of hours in learning router, switch, and firewall CLIs and want a return on this investment and this can only happen if their employer uses the equipment they are familiar with. If someone only knows the Juniper CLI then they will most likely have equal fervor for Juniper hardware. Having to use a CLI you are not familiar with adds stress to an already very stressful job.
2) Operational streamlining. Generally if every device on a Network is Cisco they will work together more reliably than if not. This isn't as true as it used to be but is still true. If your company network is Cisco only then Cisco cannot blame other manufacturers for an issue.
Personally I'm fine with having non-Cisco hardware. The Cisco Firewpower "next gen" firewalls are utter garbage compared to palo alto. My company has dozens of Cisco 2960 access switches and Cisco in their infinite wisdom has replaced this very cost effective product with the extremely NOT cost effective 9200 and 9300 series switches. If you only need gigabit ports and VLANs then the 9200 and 9300 switches are an incredible waste of money.
I'm forced to use Cisco AnyConnect to contact customer sites, but I'm about four levels of outsourcing removed from the folks who would actually have the golden keys to access the Cisco portal.
I have long ago accepted that small companies will react to your ticket in 30 minutes and deliver a fixed build in 2 hours, whereas sending bug reports to Cisco-sized corporations is about as effective as praying to the ancient gods
It could also be USERS of the Cisco anyconnect contacting him. End users should NEVER email Cisco directly.
End users should contact their IT. If needed, IT then opens a Cisco TAC case. :)
> End users should contact their IT.
The IT has been outsourced. Now the IT is a chat bot. /s
Then contact management. Their decision, their problem.
I used to “own” a port in /etc/services and got a few Emails and somehow a very irate phone call from someone that was being port scanned. (Back when we had desk phones and they could call the company main number and asked to be transferred.)
There's something quite entertaining about what people who have absolutely no idea about all this "computing" thing sometimes do to show how clueless they actually are.
My favorite was the newly hired account manager for a web dev company whom the CEO found rummaging in the supply cabinet, looking for some URLs to show clients.
https://www.askamanager.org/2021/10/the-controversial-calcul... (#19)
> looking for some URLs to show clients.
What's wrong showing URLs to clients ? /s
Happened to the thttpd author some time back.
https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html
I really like this one because it’s a valid question about an odd thing that would take a while to answer properly:
> I have a huge text on my sat nav in my car where, among other things, your email address can be seen?
> Can you tell me what this is all about?
https://daniel.haxx.se/email/2018-02-16.html
someone panicing over their job being terminated isn't very funny but the relief on someone's face when you explain that it's a computer process and not their livelihood is still something to see.
From the Mastodon comments, we have @timbray:
Not trying to be competitive, but over the years, my email flow along the lines of “My XML file isn’t working” (my email is on the front page of the spec) was occasionally um substantial. Sympathy.
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/113587445812736554
I guess in principle Tim Bray would have been in a better position to help people figure out why their XML files aren't working than Daniel Sternberg would be to help people figure out why a Cisco product isn't working, though!
Yes, Daniel Stenberg shows up in the credits on far more places than Cisco's products :-)
[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/03/screenshotted-curl-cr...
Daniels email collection is also funny [0].
[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/email/
I really like his reply to https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/08/14/so-the-department-of-.... "Sure, I'll fill in your form. However you'll need to pay me money." I wonder what the chances are that they ever did.
Surprised to see (not that funny at all) "I will slaughter you" email on the list.
Hahah! That has happened with me too. I used to work on car infotainment systems in India's biggest automobile company. After the NDA cooled off, I added the work I did on my portfolio to apply for future roles. The thing we made was amazing (for that time 2015) as it allowed people with low-end infotainments with mono color displays to have navigation support using mobile.
People saw it on my blog and sent me service queries.
My company has a name that (if you squint really, really hard) can be confused with Logitech.
So naturally, I got a few questions on topics such as non working mice or keyboards, headphones and similar.
My usual reply lately (not that many, I can still bother to reply) is "This is not the Logitech you are looking for..." with the link to the company they want.
I worked for the CSIRO division of information technology. In pre widespread internet days people found me in the phone book and wanted information about technology: typically, the dangers if their Teflon saucepan had shed into their food.
I can sympathise, cisco anyconnect is a massive massive dick to use.
I hate to think how much of a prick it is to administer.
AC is more that just a VPN client, it also can do network link authentication to switches... my biggest hell is when people's passwords expire, or get changed on another PC, which leads to PC's being knocked offline, broken network shares, and obscure error messages when applications can't access the network.
As tier 2 IT support, I much prefer Anyconnect over the Microsoft VPNs we had to wrangle...
Poor guy. After being misidentified as a threat to the us, he's having to field support requests for a malicious company. (They made it hard for people to get support for their paid product)
I'm not sure it is that hard. If you type "Cisco anyconnect support" into Google, the first result is the support page with docs/community/contact options
>They made it hard for people to get support for their paid product
It could also be USERS of the Cisco anyconnect contacting him. End users should NEVER email Cisco directly.
End users should contact their IT. If needed, IT then opens a Cisco TAC case. :)
This reminds me of the "etilqs_" files. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302805
To be fair, the curl license doesn't mention "curl" anywhere in it. It seems reasonable for someone to interpret "this software" as referring to the software product that includes the license.
Didn't this used to be a massive issue for the apache webserver team?
Yes. https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/
Who is using Cisco AnyConnect that doesn't have an IT department?
"But Daniel," emailed Pagliacci, tears in his eyes, "I am the IT department"
Seriously the number of times I've seen companies lay off the only person who knew anything about X without realising they'd been dealing with problems with X for years and now that falls on a manager, a new hire, an intern...there's also people who don't know who to ask internally, or worse, feel like they can't ask internally because it will make them look incompetent.
Early in my career, the top nerd in the office knew all the answers, but delighted in being unremittingly rude and humiliating to anyone who deigned to ask him anything. That's the kind of behaviour that leads to people seeking any other channel for help. The best thing I learned from him was not to be like him.
Many people, sometimes with good reason, will try literally anything before trying to contact their in-house IT support.
I wonder if they still use a version of cURL from 2006. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/curl-...
On version 4.10.x of the client it's copyright 1996-2019, so no..
This reminds me on how Spotify's bug bounty program keeps receiving vulnerability reports about Shopify, and how Shopify keeps receiving vulnerability reports from Spotify. This went so far that they had to explicitly put the other company's domain as out of scope on their bug bounty policy.
Another favourite after „I have toyota corola” emails to curl maintainer