The Riverbed TAC provides technical support for operational issues related to Riverbed products in your network. There are six TAC centers globally distributed to provide follow-the-sun support: Sydney in Australia, Singapore, Hoofddorp in the Netherlands, Bracknell in the United Kingdom, New York in the eastern USA and Sunnyvale and San Francisco in the western USA.
They can be reached via email (mail to support@riverbed.com), via the Riverbed Support website (http://support.riverbed.com/cases/) or via the telephone (+1 415 247 7831).
There are four priority levels which are used by Riverbed TAC to find out the urgency of a case: P1 for critical issues, P2 for urgent issues, P3 for normal issues or questions and P4 for administrative issues.
For a case opened via email, it will always open as a P3. Cases opened via the website or via the phone can have their priority set during the entering process.
Do not open a P1 case via email or the website, always call in to get immediate support.
For non-P1 cases, the TAC engineer assigned to the case will most likely answer via email. If you want to be contacted via telephone to discuss, please state this and the telephone number you can be reached on in the initial email.
Sometimes cases are opened or picked up outside your normal business hours and are handled by a TAC engineer outside your region. If the situation sounds urgent and no contact could be made, the TAC engineer will re-queue the case to the appropriate region for follow up during your business hours. If this has not happened, feel free to call in the to TAC to request the case to be re-assigned to a local TAC engineer.
To make life easier of the TAC engineer and for a quicker handling of the case, please consider the following issues:
The systems involved in the issue can be either a single Steelhead appliance in case of a hardware problem. It can multiple Steelhead appliances on multiple sites of the network. It can include non-Riverbed devices, like Exchange servers or firewalls.
Make sure you are able to describe the network around the Steelhead appliances:
What are the devices connected to the Steelhead appliance?
Are there IDS/IPS/firewalls devices on the network between the client and server?
Are there any load-balancers involved?
Are the Steelhead appliances on this site a new implementation?
Were there any changes to the network earlier?
Were there any changes to the clients or servers earlier?
Please create a system dump on the devices you are experiencing a problem on. If the issue is hardware related, a system dump of the device itself is sufficient. If the issue is not hardware related, then the system dumps of all the devices involved will most likely be required.
System dumps can be either:
Emailed to the TAC engineer. There is a 50 Mb size limit on incoming emails.
Attached to the case at the Riverbed Support website. There is a 100 Mb size limit on files uploaded via the Riverbed Support website.
Uploaded to the Riverbed FTP server at ftp://ftp.riverbed.com/incoming/. Please prefix the file uploaded with the string "case_NNNNNN_" so the files can be easily identified. Make sure you use the FTP client Binary Mode to transfer the files. There is no size limit on this method.
The /incoming directory is write-only and the contents are hidden, which means that you can only upload files to it and not see the directory contents. If the upload gets aborted half-way then it is not possible to resume the upload. If this happens, change the filename and retry the upload again.
Since RiOS version 8.5, the GUI and the CLI allow upload to the FTP server directly. If the network policies allow the Steelhead appliance to access the Riverbed FTP directly, please use that method.
Be stored on a private dropbox system of your choice so that the TAC engineer can retrieve it from there.
If the system dump is too large to be emailed or uploaded in one go, consider splitting the system dump with WinZIP or WinRAR so that the pieces can be emailed or uploaded without running into the size or access restrictions.
If you get an alarm from the Steelhead appliance via email, attach it to the case. Not all the information from these emails is available from the system dump.
If the issue seems to be a hardware problem, please obtain the following details in case an RMA is required:
The name, email address and telephone number of the person who will receive the replacement part.
The address to send the replacement part to.
If it is a full-chassis RMA, please state if the device has RSP features installed and the number of by-pass cards and their types installed.
For Platinum and Gold Plus support RMAs, please state the date and time the delivery and replacement can be done (ASAP or a specific date/time) and any access restrictions to the site.
For full chassis replacements in Platinum support RMAs, note that the field engineer swaps the device and only configures the device in such a way that the primary interface is reachable on the network. Software upgrades and further configuration will need to be done by the customer.
In general, once a case is submitted (New), it will be picked up by a TAC engineer (Working). During the investigation of the issue, it might be that the TAC engineer is waiting for further information like RMA details, a system dump or tcpdump traces (Waiting Customer Information). At a certain moment the problem has been identified and can be rectified (Waiting Solution Verification) and closure of the case (Pending Closure). Sometimes the problem needs a solution in the RiOS software itself to engineering (Waiting for Engineering Fix, Waiting Software Release) but at the end it will be all resolved (Closed).
There are other states, for example when a case is opened on a device without a valid support contract (Waiting Entitlement) or when an RMA has been issued (Waiting Hardware Replacement).