Austin, we have a problem :-)

Some time ago I opened a support ticket in IBM about a really tricky issue with DAOS:
a few attachments referenced in the DAOS system could not be opened by the Domino server itself (error shown both in Domino console and to the Notes user). Not all, just a few hundreds attachments.

The ticket escaleted weeks after weeks, but the support group could not help me, also I had the feeling they wanted to close the ticket asap...

After a while I contacted Ed Brill who was so polite to also involve IBM Support in the US:
after some hours I got a call from Rick Catania, from  Austin (Texas).

Rick was really driven to help me:
we started to work together remotely, collecting all the info needed and making a Domino test environment to reproduce the problem.

He found out the cause of the problem (*) and also suggest a smart and unsupported way to recovery the wrongly encrypted files in the DAOS repository (even though some conditions must be verified before starting that dangerous activity, maybe I will write about it in later post).

It is a while since Rick solved the ticket, I was a "little" bit busy, but I really appreciated the job he did:
 you know, often we complain about slow/useless tech support (I had some cases also with other big vendors), but when you meet somebody really nice and smart you need to thank him/her publicly, it's fair:

thanks Rick & Ed for you help, people like you make IBM a great company.

PS
this is not s promotional post, it's a true storie and I did not get paid to write about it! :-D

*
 a server id switch between a test server id and a production server id, with encryption first enabled and later disabled, somehow problem generated by the customer-