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Comment by ibmthrowaway218 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the pitfalls of a public only support mailing list. I know I post using a gmail psuedonym to get support for various open source apps that I use for side projects.

I'd be looking to provide an extra private/internal support email address made available to the largest customers.

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Except that even the basic support [1] includes that:

> Support via private (email) ticketing system, with guaranteed 8 hour response time, during European office hours (9AM – 6PM, or 3AM – noon EST). Includes resolution of 5 incidents. Does not include DNSSEC support.

although CloudFlare should have probably bought the carrier grade support.

[1]: https://www.powerdns.com/support.html

Exactly correct. This implies that Cloudflare was using PowerDNS and (as was their right) chose not to pay for even basic support.

I'm not sure what else PowerDNS could have done in this situation, and I can only imagine their teeth gnashing when they found they'd lost a lighthouse user.

Typically, lighthouse customers almost always also pay for support. Upon reflection, their post-mortem blog post was extremely well handled and written.

We in the computer business are well aware that some bug reports don't get fixed - such as because they require new features outside the scope of the project, or because fixing them is a huge hassle.

A "carrier grade" support contract sounds expensive.

If I'm going to my boss to ask for $x0,000 for a support contract because of a specific bug we're experiencing, I need to know the resolution won't be "WONTFIX"

Those are indeed common issues in our industry. However, in this specific case, PowerDNS specifically calls this out on their support section of their page: "Many (large) developments in PowerDNS have been funded by operators that wanted to expedite the authoring of the features they needed."[1]

Also, carrier grade support does indeed sound expensive for a small shop. Might even be deemed expensive for a medium-large shop (since they don't list pricing details). However, for an outfit as large as CloudFlare, I find it hard pressed to believe they couldn't afford Basic Support considering that one of their engineers on this thread stated that DNS is a critical part of CloudFlare's core service offering.

You don't ask for a support contract for a specific bug, but for a general class of support and current + future bugs. As part of the negotiation, your boss and organization can also leverage "lighthouse" status to influence PowerDNS to fix even minor bugs quickly as part of a negotiated Service Level Agreement ("SLA").

EDIT: To give CloudFlare the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that PowerDNS didn't make their support options clear to users before, and only updated their support pages after this post-mortem.

[1] https://www.powerdns.com/enhancements.html

And no prices on that page at all, so you need to contact them, and then you are dealing with a salesperson who sees CloudFare as a whale who needs to buy the $$$ carrier-grade support and get them a big commission.

This is sadly such a common issue these days. Please give some idea of your pricing! Not providing any pricing information at all on your website is a massive disincentive to paying for your services. I don't want to have to deal with sales people who will continually spam me with email and phone calls if I ask for pricing, and will want to have a 20 minute call to "understand my requirements".

By all means put an asterisk saying that the prices are guides only, or have large letters saying discounts may apply, or whatever, if you must. But not doing anything doesn't just aggravate your customers - it often means we go elsewhere or just use mailing lists for support.

If the customer would rather build their own system than risk talking to someone on the phone where money might be discussed, I'm not sure that the open-source vendor is the problem.

The contention was that Cloudfare could have just signed up for the cheap support plan if they wanted private problem reporting, and I don't think that would be as easy as was suggested.

It's not that hard to dig around and find someone you can email privately. For many open source projects, that can be kind of annoying, but if it's really, honestly, something that's kind of private, or if there's money involved, the developers are probably going to be more understanding.

This circumstance would be amusing to me if it wasn't way too common. People that are employed in or close to software development are well aware that when communication with user/clients/whatever is complicated. Incomplete and misinformed interpretation of requirements are the poster child of difficulty to discuss software. Then a developer turns around and fails to communicate with the people that develop the software they use.

For all the huffing and puffing I see people do about professionalism, very few of the "professional" mailing lists I'm subscribed to have adults that can say "I'm A at B, and am looking for a contact at C to email me off-list to discuss D."

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