Hi all,

I've been encountering problems using the web-based HP Support Line,
and was wondering if anyone else has, and if anyone is interested in
helping to push for some solutions that would cost HP little (and would,
in fact, save them money).

The most recent problem was this weekend, when attempts to get
http://us-support.external.hp.com (or other pages at that site) were met
with "error 403" (access forbidden).
(This happened from a variety of sites, not just ours.)

Today (Monday), I've been getting hangs, and infrequently, "service
not available", when trying to login.  (I'm continuing to try.)

Wait...fresh news, 5 minutes after clicking "OK" on the login screen,
I got "logged in", finally.

Now, when I try to do a search, after about 1.5 minutes I get back:
   HP Electronic Support Center Failed
   Hewlett-Packard regrets this service is temporarily unavailable.
   Please try again later.

This is a critical problem, as it precludes getting timely
information from HPSL, as well as precluding submitting bug reports
electronically.

Although *this* instance may be solved in some manner (e.g., rebooting
the HPSL web server), it can happen again...

A two-pronged permanent solution is necessary:

   1) an email address needs to be published that allows bug reports
      to be submitted via email.  This allows a time-break between
      entering the bug report, and HP's reading the bug report,
      and would handle the event of HP's being offline for up to
      several days.  (The current method requires that 3 things be
      up simulataneously: the user's web browser, the internet, and
      HP's web server.)

   2) The documents in the technical support database must be put
      on a publically available web server, searchable by all
      web crawlers/robots/spiders ... so we have multiple public
      search engines available for searching the documents, instead
      of relying on a single server at HPSL.
      (With many web servers, significant portions of the documents would
      be available via the search engine even if HP's server is offline.)

      This would have a secondary benefit of dramatically increasing
      the performance of searching for bug reports, and the sophistication
      of queries.  (Performance increase because the searching is distributed
      over multiple search engines, instead of one server (or set?) at HP.)

What do you think?

thanks,
[log in to unmask]

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html