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Sophos Support Dissapointment

absolut_legend

Hi All,

I can not seem to get anyone at Sophos support to provide any kind of useful support. I am curious if anyone else is experiencing this.

The forums are down, their support sucks and one of my clients's email proxy is down in a HA production environment...

Last time I had an issue, I had to resort to a clean firmware install to fix it as I could not continue waiting for a dead-loop solution.

This time... seems it is the same. I'm being bounced between support staff that don't provide an answer, don't provide any reassurance and refuse to call their client back.

After over 15+ years of supporting Astaro and Sophos... I just can't believe it has gotten so bad.

Maybe, just maybe... someone will read this and perhaps react and get back to me.

Otherwise, looks like my weekend is gone doing a complete firmware reinstall again and having to calm very heated customers.



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  • Now that customers and resellers are having to go to Sophos Support for most help, I expect that they're overwhelmed as they also relied on the old User BB to help them close cases.

    What is the problem with the email proxy?

    Cheers - Bob
  • support has been a joke since day one
  • in reply to BAlfson
    This post may have gotten through, today I got a call and people actually moved and fixed it.

    It was an SMTP Database corruption issue.

    I'm still waiting for an answer as to what caused it and how to prevent as the client wants root cause & preventative action in place.

    My concern is if this corruption was caused by a malformed malware email designed to do what it did... this would be serious for all users.

    No reply on this just yet.

    It seems there needs to be a separate smtp instance for system messages and alerts so at the very least we can get notified of the situation and start working on it before it gets out of hand.
  • Hi absolut_legend

    I know about situations like that and am happy the box is running again, and we are also 15+ Astaro Users :-)

    About support I can only tell you that my last support phonecall this summer (we had 3 calls in 15 years...) was answered from somebody in Germany, our HA configuration got corrupted and they wanted to help. But the knowledge and experience wasn't really big (we found out ourselves that linked aggregated interfaces get lost when establishing the HA slave but didn't do more analysis).

    It might also be a question if you have premium support or standard and as we are in Switzerland I don't know about support in US. If you don't have really redundant installations I would suppose a premium support contract as also technicians want to get paid if they have to be experienced and available around the clock.

    cheers

    ....and of course we bemoan the loss of Astaro as company, I just hope that Sophos keeps up a high level, sometimes after some years those big concerns separate again and who knows if Astaro is coming back.
  • in reply to absolut_legend
    Sometimes, this just happens, so I don't think you'll get an answer to the root cause. I doubt that it's anything to do with malware.

    Billybob gave a prescription for repairing the SMTP PostgreSQL database:

    /var/mdw/scripts/smtp stop
    dropdb -U postgres smtp
    createdb -U postgres smtp
    /var/mdw/scripts/smtp start

    If that doesn't fix you up, you can redo ALL of the PostgreSQL databases with (caution, deletes all reporting and graph data, but nothing in the logs):

    /etc/init.d/postgresql92 rebuild

    Cheers - Bob
  • Hi . I've had a chance to look into and review the ticket 5555279 you've submitted and I also think that we should have provided a better service and response to you. I'm going to forward this case onto the service managers as part of our service improvement reviews.
    I will also follow up with them on getting responses to your remaining questions.

    Best regards,
    Sure Win
  • in reply to BAlfson
    Hi Bob, Thanks.
    Not sure if you're privi to the email going back and forth on this support case.

    My client wants a root cause (have) and preventative measure in place (don't have).

    Also, how are we to know about a DB corruption ? Is there a notification for it ? any monitoring of it? Seems like a pretty serious point that should have a notification...

    Then the next question is, when the SMTP relay is down like this, how would the system notify you as it can't email out. Would a Smart relay work and make sense ?

    ... there are still unanswered questions from Sophos that I believe back in the Astaro days would have been answered on day 1.
  • in reply to Sure Win 2
    Hi SureWin2,

    Thanks, you should also review the entire email thread as it contains the last fiasco and lack of support.

    I'm happy to hear you will help with the remaining questions, client is going with ISO 27001 and this is one of the reasons why I need the remaining questions answered.

    BTW, if there is no solution then please be open about it. I was thinking perhaps a separate syslog server that is checking the system logs for any database failure strings and then emailing alerts via a smarthost on a separate gateway would be a possible solution... but this is not ideal as it requires additional setup and maintenance/monitoring... so on...
  • in reply to absolut_legend
    Well, since I'm not a Sophos employee, no, I have no idea what's in those emails. Do you know if the prescription I gave above is what Sophos Support used to repair the problem? You never said what caused you to submit a case to Support - was it an email notification, a failure to deliver mail or ???

    Cheers - Bob
  • in reply to BAlfson
    Hi Bob,

    I think the whole logs from the mailmanager will be lost, right? And does this also delete the quarantined mails?


    regards
    Sebastian