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Very very bad support from Meinberg getting better?

November 23rd, 2012 No comments

Last two weeks I had to update some NTP servers from one German company. When I requested new firmware I received following e-mail:

Dear Sir,
 unfortunately, I cannot provide a new firmware since your compact flash card is too small and the action might end up in a system’s inconsistency.
Thus, you are also not the only customer who is affected by this, we offer bigger compact flash cards for 65€ each. Please let me know whether this is of interest for you and if you need an official offer.
Mit freundlichem Gruß / With kind regards
 

So this made my very upset. To be able to upgrade to the newest version of firmware I had to pay 65EUR for new flashcard. So I wrote couple e-mail to this company. I wanted to know the reason why I need to invest more to NTP server. I found out that firmware got big and it cannot be uploaded into flash which came with NTP server. This looked weird to me. Why would I have to invest into device if manufacter’s engineers made a mistake. I already decided not to sell manufacter’s devices. And I though that was end of the story.

Today I received following e-mail:

Dear Ondrej,
 
I just wanted to let you know that we dramatically improved our update procedure and, after an intensive clean-up, released
the new firmware version 5.34h which can be installed on 64MB compact flash cards without any problems. The new release is 4 MB (~25%) smaller (!) than the previous version without removing any features.
 
Although you already expressed your extreme dissatisfaction with our products and decided for yourself to not recommend or
buy Meinberg products in the future, your feedback helped us to improve our software and I sincerely thank you for that.
 
Best Regards,
 Heiko
 

So it’s funny how some angry and mad e-mails can change such a things. Now we can upgrade our devices. But I don’t think we will offer them anymore to customers 🙂