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  84                   <p>I use both proprietary software as well as open source software. One would think that when you pay for your software and pay a lot for support, then obviously you must be in a better situation should something not work correctly. But my experience has been the opposite. Not always but often. I can only attribute this to the fact that when dealing with OSS you often are talking directly with the developer who has pride in his work and wants it to work correctly. He is bothered when people report problems in his software and motivated to try and fix it.</p>
  85
  86 <p>On the other hand we've all had our "experiences" with so called front line support people who sometimes barely know how the software they support operates or even how to spell its name correctly, who ask their customers to reboot their Linux server that's been up for the last 3 years to see if that will "help".</p>
  87
  88 <p>IBM/Rational Support is far from that bad - often they are excellent. But it does seem that sometimes when the problem is a little thorny they will punt and say this is "outside of scope" - whatever that means.</p>
  89
  90 <p>I must admit my process is slightly complicated - a CQPerl script which serves as a multiprocess server which forks off a copy of itself to handle request to process Clearquest data. For anybody who has written such server processes they can be tricky at first to program and get right, but soon turn into just another programming task like any other.</p>
  91
  92 <p>The problem arises in an odd way in which a request comes in to add a record. BuildEntity is called and the record is successfully added. But when a second process later attempts to do a similar thing - add a record - the BuildEntity fails stating:</p>
  93
  94 <blockquote>
  95 Status: 1 unknown exception from CQSession_BuildEntity in CQPerlExt at  cqserver.pl line 31.
  96 </blockquote>
  97
  98 <p>The support engineer eventually responded with:</p>
  99
 100 <blockquote>
 101 On 1/25/2013 10:40 AM, Naomi Guerrero wrote:<br><br>
 102 Hi Andrew,<br><br>
 103 I'm following up on escalated PMR#16866,227,000. After escalating this PMR to L3 support, and Development having discussions about this issue, this request goes outside the scope of support. This is not something we can assist you with in support. Instead, I would recommend you reach out to your Sales agent at IBM (or I can) so that someone from the Rational Services team can further assist you.
 104 </blockquote>
 105
 106 To which I responded:
 107
 108 <blockquote>
 109 <p>On 1/25/2013 11:00 AM, Andrew DeFaria wrote:</p>
 110 <p>How can you possibly say that this goes outside the scope of support?!? We have a situation here where <b>your</b> software returns the words "unknown exception", fails to do what it's advertised to do (Build and entity) and even stops my script from continuing! This is clearly an error in IBM's software. I have a reproducible test case (you'll need our schema, which I supplied). There's is nothing in my code that is outside of a supported situation - I'm using regular CQPerl stuff and every call is supported. It's on supported hardware, with supported versions of OS, Clearquest, CQPerl, etc. Why BuildEntity returning "unknown exception"? Surely this is in the code for BuildEntity. Somebody should examine it and report back! This is clearly an error and I fail to see how it goes outside of the scope of support at all. If the problem is difficult to solve that does not put it into the realm of "outside of support".</p>
 111
 112 <p>My client pays IBM big $$$ for support every year if I remember how IBM support contracts go. We want our money's worth. While I fail to see how a "Sales" agent will be able to assist (I personally think a knowledgable software developer like the guy who's responsible for the BuildEntity code - you do have somebody like that no? - should look into the code and see exactly what circumstances causes BuildEntity to emit such an error) if that's the next step then by all means take it and reach out to whoever is next in line to assist. But from where I sit this is indeed a bug and is not outside the scope of support. If you believe it is then please explain yourself. Why is this "outside the scope of support"?</p>
 113 </blockquote>
 114
 115 <p>Now granted it appears that this happens <b>only</b> with out schema (Works fine with the SAMPL database) but that seems to point to either a problem somewhere with action hook code being executed (which would also be deemed a bug as action hook code should never cause <b>unknown exception</b>s to happen or it could be caused by some corruption in my client's database - something that should be pursued - not dropped to "Sales"!</p>
 116
 117 <p>Problem report <a href="https://www-947.ibm.com/support/servicerequest/problemDescriptionSelect.action?srNumber=16866&branch=227&retainCountryCode=000">16866,227 000: unknown exception from CQSession_BuildEntity</a></p>
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