Interesting day on the phone with DLink.  When I say “day”, I do mean DAY.  More or less, Monday must be DLink’s crazy time when everyone comes back from work and finds their office routers dead or something.

The DIR-825 model C1 that I initially bought to test out MIPS on FreeBSD died a noble death for science last month, so I thought I’d see if I could get DLink to replace it for me.  Long story short, they gave me an RMA for it and the new one will be here next week.  Short story long, wow.

I think I was on hold for close to an hour to get to the level 1 technician.  This tech was super nice but awfully frustrating to deal with.  She didn’t ask if I had an existing case number, she didn’t ask what I had already done to try and resolve the issue nor did she understand that I had already gone through all the reset procedures on their web site in order to resolve this issue in the first place.  However, in the technician’s defence, I am kind of a tool.  Not to mention that she absolutely has a script that she must follow AND most people calling in are not nearly as technically savvy as I was to detonate the router in the first place.

So 1 hour on hold, then 2 hours with the level 1 technician.  In frustration, I started to ask about getting a replacement.  I assume that this is a key phrase that triggers escalation to level 2.  That’s right, LEVEL 2.  Speaking with the senior technician at level 2, it became very clear that we were speaking the same language.  Heck, the technician actually asked me what my Unix boxes see from a DHCP request.  AMAZING.  When I passed on the information that, no its quite dead now, getting to the RMA stage was almost trivial.

I wonder, what could make this situation easier for DLink and easier for their users.  I mean, most cases they deal with are just simple configuration mistakes, not real hardware issues.  My case was the exception, not the rule in their universe.  I think this means that Internet is hard.

I’ll go into more details on my science tomorrow, when I get the RMA sent off and can deal with the DIR-825 Model B1 that is totally working with FreeBSD MIPS now.  By the way, totally awesome.  SCIENCE!