Fedex: A study in poor customer service

I bought a bike from someone I met online who is enthusiastic about the same
kind of bikes that I am. I negotiated it all online. Sent him a check. He
took the bike to a bike shop he trusts to have them box it up and ship it to
me.

The bike is a kogswell 2005 P58. They don’t make them anymore and there
weren’t a lot of them when they were made. I wanted this one so I bought it.
The bikes when they were new looked like this:

http://www.kogswell.com/p.html

The bike shop packed it up like any other bike they would ship and sent it off
to me using fedex. The box arrived here and there was a problem. There was
a fair bit of damage to the box.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2514/4167845881_1d238325e0_b.jpg

And most of all the seat tube lug was bent fairly horribly. The box was dropped
(on the wrong side) and then slid or dragged for a good distance. That’s pretty
much the only thing that could make that kind of damage from what I can tell.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2726/4167843761_5075a6b405_b.jpg
and
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2564/4168606752_4b2c42d852_b.jpg

This is what it SHOULD look like:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/23/34509120_bc65826f8a_b.jpg

I called fedex told them what happened and asked what I should do. They said
I should file a damaged merchandise claim and they emailed me the form I
should use to do that. I took detailed pictures and I filled out the form.
I sent all of this information in via email as suggested on the form. I did
all of this the night of december 7th/morning of december 8th. The form
suggested I would hear back with 24/48 hours. So, I waited.

And waited a bit more.

I decided to call them and find out the status of things. I called and was told
that I would hear from someone shortly. This was december 9th.

December 10th 8:30am. A fedex person comes to my door to pick up “2 packages”.
I have no idea what he’s talking about so I don’t give him anything and call
fedex for more information. The proceed to tell me that he was there to pickup
the package that was damaged to bring them to fedex for inspection and then
to return them to the shipper (the bike shop).

At this point no one has emailed, no one has called, no one has told me
ANYTHING.

Fedex wanting to take the bike and packaging and inspect it seems reasonable
enough but sending it back to the bike shop makes no sense. The bike shop can’t
do anything about it. They don’t have another one to send me, they don’t even
have my money. They are just the folks who took it apart and put it in a box.

Moreover, fedex wanting to ship it back two states away in a damaged box is just
going to FURTHER damage a product I can’t get ANOTHER ONE of. I asked what I
should do to not have it shipped back they then told me that the bike is
not mine and that I could do nothing about it. They said the bike belongs to
the bike shop. Now, I took issue with this. The bike belongs to me. My check has
been cashed, I have possession of it. I’m pretty confident it is mine. So, I
asked again what I should do to have this problem addressed without the bike
going back to the bike shop. I was told there was nothing I could do. I said
I really don’t believe that and asked to speak to a supervisor. I spoke to
someone else who told me that the bike shop could fax a waiver that gave fedex
the right to interact with me, the recipient. I said great. I called the bike
shop and asked them to call fedex about this package and fax in the waiver.

The bike shop did this, happily. I waited some more. I call later in that day to
find out the status of things. I was told that the fax has not come in and that
there is nothing they can do. I call the bike shop back to confirm. They say it
was received and confirm it. I call back to fedex. I ask to speak to someone
about the customer service problem. I’m told they will have to call me back.
I never receive a phone call back.

Later the same afternoon the fedex guy comes back by the house to pick up the
bike, again. No change there whatsoever. I tell him my tale of woe. He explains
that the drivers and the claims department are separate groups and don’t
overlap. He also told me to stay on the claims department. He said they have
to do all sorts of things to make claims do anything, too.

A working day goes by. I call back to fedex who now tells me they have received
the fax. However, the bike shop didn’t sign the fax so they can’t act on it.
I call the bike shop back and ask them to sign and refax the waiver. They do so.

Worthy of note. I’ve not been contacted a single time by anyone from fedex.
I’ve not been notified by email or by phone. I have to start all communications
with them. I’m sure they have added me to their ‘angry person’ file b/c I am
quite angry.

Also worthy of note. The guy who sold me the bike and the bike shop who sent it
to me have all been helpful and cool. They’ve responded promptly and with
consideration to these problems.

It’s now December 11th. I don’t expect to see any additional movement on this
until next week.

fudcon2009 summary or “I can see him by his hair”

[Note: Originally these were going to be daily posts but the network was not good so I put them all in one]

relatively uneventful flights – one was early the other was on time. shocking.

trip to the hotel was longish but not bad. hotel is very pleasant and well organized.

dinner with max and mdomsch.

back to the hotel and hours sitting and talking before I turned into a pumpkin and crashed.

Up early for breakfast then the bus over to the university. I don’t think I’ve seen as many people in a room for fudcon before. Rather impressive. We seem to have overloaded the barcamp concept b/c there was simply too much going on but we got started at noon so only an hour off schedule.

Talks:

deltacloud and ec2 discussion first – good talk – deltacloud makes a lot of sense, conceptually to me, to manage the cloud explosion of apis. Not sure yet how the implementation will work out. Sounds like the ec2 talk will result in a hackfest tomorrow or monday. I would not be surprised to see current fedora images on ec2 very soon. The set of steps to get fedora available on ec2 sounds straightforward and do-able. Probably the most memorable portion of this talk was watching the glass windows behind the speaker and see Mel Chua run past 3 times with increasingly more speed or larger loads of things. It was hilarious.

mirror-manager/Chasm – mirrormanager was mdomsch’s normal talk. Yay Matt.

Chasm, however,  was different and hopeful. Essentially it is a tool to sync mirrors with a mirror master or an upstream tier of a mirror system. But beyond that it also wants to have the mirrors sync to and from each other. It stores a manifest cache so you don’t take the filelist-creation hit like you do with rsync and it runs constantly so you don’t have to  schedule the starts/stops. It’s not finished yet but it looks hopeful. Matt and I made sure that the guys working on chasm had some time to sit and talk with John Hawley at kernel.org.

Lunch: Vegetarian existed, yay. But given our late start and the time lunch was I’m fairly certain I could have eaten the paper bag it came in.

sysadmins vs devels panel: I got to speak a bit and rant a little and I think I was understood. The gist of the problem is: development is fun – maintaining what you’ve written is not fun. So developers get all the fun parts and sysadmins get all the not fun parts – and you wonder why sysadmins always seem so grumpy.

Yum Talk: Not a lot of people showed up – despite it getting lots of tick marks in the barcamp voting. I suspect it is b/c of the autoqa and kill-cvs talks going on at the same time. My talk slides are here: http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/yum-f12-future.pdf . It all went fine, I got a number of good questions and generally not much complaining, which was nice.

mmcgrath’s infrastructure debugging talk: some nice info on tracing down pain and problems in an infrastructure. I’d read the slides before but not heard the talk so it was worth hearing. Mike is fairly humorous to listen to anyway.

Paul’s closing talk: “I can see him by his hair”. That’s all I really can say, or, at least that’s the note I wrote down in big letters. Pretty sure this was about looking for overholt.

Fudpub: At a Dave and Busters which was like a big bar and arcade mixed together. On the plus side it was warm and everyone left us alone, which is nice.

Wandered back to hotel, did a few misc things then crashed.

Day 2: Hackfests

- eventually migrating over to the hackfest building around 9:30ish or so. A good conversation with walters about things he wants to eventually see in PK that needs some pieces in the repodata and in yum. Simple simple simple patch sent to rpm-maint for one of the items(Provides: app($name-of-desktop-file)). Small addition to yum for another one (return_running_packages). Then a small patch to mash to put files into

Packages/y/yum-3.2.25-4.noarch.rpm subdirs,though Bill fixed it, though b/c I had missed the right spot for it by a few lines.

Fair bit of time talking to folks about less technical and more cultural/social problems we’re dealing with.

Lunch was good, Toshio discovered a food court thing that had good restaurants so I got a falafel and a smoothie.

I opted to not go ice skating mainly b/c I don’t like tempting fate that much.

Sat around and talked with a lot of folks in the hack-lounge room in the hotel. This was fun and amusing for a couple of hours.

Up the next morning, breakfast and caught up with Max and Matthew Daniels to share a cab to the airport. Talked to Max for a while at the airport about all sorts of fedora-y things and came up with an app to implement in tg2/fcomm to make things better at fudcon.

Thanks to all who organized and made things work. I appreciated it and I was impressed with how things were executed.

fedora poker chips

fedora poker chips

Originally uploaded by skvidal

more detailed blog entry soon, still composing the thoughts, but receiving these was a highlight of fudcon this year. Thanks to inode0 for making them. These will be in a special place on my desk for a loooooooong time to come.

yum

yum

Originally uploaded by skvidal

celebrate all good things – and happy thanksgiving.

- seen in the grocery store

polkit and package kit and changing settings

In f12 the default policy for polkit for package kit is to allow users at the
desktop to install signed pkgs from repositories enabled on the system.

Some folks are unhappy about this so I investigated a bit. Ray Strode looked
through the polkit code to figure out the answers.

The short answer is to run (as root)

pklalockdown –lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install

to remove this lockdown run (as root):

pklalockdown –remove-lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install

 

Update: According davidz in the comments below the above command is going away. So if you want to keep users from installing pkgs you need to follow the longer instructions below.

the long answer explains a bit about polkit.

To get a list of all actions that policykit knows about you run:

pkaction

to get information about the system defaults for any action you run:

pkaction –action-id actionname –verbose

this only tells you what the system defaults are. It doesn’t tell you what
the current runtime policy is going to do.

examples:
pkaction –action-id org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install –verbose

org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install:
description:       Install signed package
message:           Authentication is required to install a signed package
vendor:            The PackageKit Project
vendor_url:        http://www.packagekit.org/
icon:              package-x-generic
implicit any:      no
implicit inactive: no
implicit active:   yes

Now, if I want to change the value of this to something more specific you need
to edit a file:
/var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-my-pkgkit-policy.pkla

in this file you would put:

[Only Let Admins Install Packages]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install
ResultAny=auth_admin
ResultInactive=auth_admin
ResultActive=auth_admin

save it and that’s it.

The line Identity let’s you specify users or groups that the policy impacts.
The items are ; separated and each one must start with unix-user or unix-group
and have a user, group or wildcard following it.

Now, if you want to test to make sure this works you can, of course, run the
program in question. OR you can use pkcheck.

you use pkcheck like this:
pkcheck –action-id org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install \
–process $process_id_of_the_process_making_the_request \
-u $the_username_you_are_testing

the process id I used was of a shell of the user or was the gnome-session process.

it should pop up an auth dialog if you did everything correctly.

For more complete docs look at:
man pklocalauthority

and

man polkit

hope this helps.

yum updating to fedora 12 from fedora 11

Yes,  I know it’s not supported, but neither is anything else. I took the time on friday to try out the yum update and it worked swimmingly. Here are the steps I took:

0. I ran pybackpack and duplicity and backed up all my stuff to remote

1. download fedora-release and fedora-release notes from the f12 mirrors

2. yum localinstall them

3. yum clean all

4. screen

5. yum update yum\* rpm\*

6. yum update python\*

7. yum update glibc\*

8. yum update kernel

9. yum update

10. yum groupinstall “GNOME Desktop Environment” base core

11. yum remove specspo mlocate sendmail

12. logout and reboot

It took a while to get everything and I had to break a few pieces up in order to make all the pkgs fit when I downloaded them but everything else just worked.

Proceed at your own risk.

playing with another yum-util

This morning I was annoyed by a perl module which took the output from yumdownloader –resolve –urls, screenscraped it, downloaded the pkgs then passed them to rpm -Uvh. Let’s ignore all the things which could break there – just the ugliness of it.

So I hashed this together:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/yumpipes.py

I’m not sure I like it yet, but it is a start.

You can pass multiple items on the command line doing multiple things like:

yumpipes –install=foo –install=baz –update=quux –remove=sendmail

and you can pass –dry-run which runs the transaction in test mode

and you can pass –report-only  which only spits out what the transaction would do.

and the output from the transaction and from the –list option is pipe-delimited so people using awk or cut can easily parse it.

finally. the error codes, while not great, are somewhat consistent.

flames welcome.

 

what needs to be restarted

A common problem I’ve encountered for years is how to know what daemons need to be restarted in order to take advantage of some update or to be sure that they are running the secure version of the libs you just updated. I was thinking about this yesterday and realized I had all the tools necessary to find this out.

I came up with this simple script: needs_to_be_restarted.py

Now, it might be a bit overly simple and that is why I’m asking here. All it does is go through each of the processes in /proc/###### open the smaps file and look for files. For any of the files in there, it checks if a pkg owns them. If it does it checks what the installtime is on that package. If the installtime of the package is newer than when the process was started then it reports that pid (and the cmdline).

Now, this won’t work in every case, and I may have it report if the files have been removed but it seems to work pretty well.

If there are more foolproof ways to know or additional checks I should add, let me know.

If this looks good I’ll probably add some options and add it to yum-utils.

rail system

A semi-heartening comment today from this cnnfn article:

“Our country’s future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system,” Buffett said in a statement.

yum nag plugin

James and I were talking on irc about things we see in bugs that make us cringe. That people  are doing on their systems with yum or rpm or vaguely related. It reminded me of this list of  sysadmin aphorisms that I worked on about 3 or 4 yrs ago now.

So I was thinking what we need is a  yum nag plugin that when you run it as root it would emit some warnings about things you probably don’t want to be doing. Examples:

1. Warning: You have 10+ plugins installed and enabled, this is probably going to have odd effects

2. Warning: You have more than 5000 pkgs installed. Do you really need all that stuff?

3. Warning: Your system has been up for 528 days. Massive uptimes aren’t  as cool as you think

4. Warning: We’ve search ~/.bash_history and found evidence of –force and/or –nodeps – these are not wise.

5. Warning: You’ve disabled gpg checking. Bad, Bad.

6. Warning: You have 10 repositories enabled and 30 available. Seriously?

7. Warning: You have 4 versions of perl|python|ruby installed – this is just going to end in tears

8. Warning: Rawhide is enabled. I hope you know what you’re doing.

9. Warning: You have kernel modules installed. Good luck with those distro upgrades.

 

What else should be added here?