Dave Atkin dla1@york.ac.uk writes:

We just received some replacement LRC cards for our FC8 shelves, but I've had endless conversations with Federal Express about VAT.

Apparently because they are new parts, UK Customs require VAT to be paid on them (Universities can't generally reclaim VAT). The fact that they are warranty replacements seems to make no difference.

I'm trying to get our reseller to sort this out but it would be really helpful if Netapp could do someting with the paperwork to avoid this in the future when they ship replacement parts to us.

David Carter, who is responsible for a couple of our F740s, has reminded me of the following incident [ABC are our current reseller]:

| I had a similiar problem when I had to RMA a replacement environment | monitoring unit last year. The shipping company in Holland kept phoning me | up every few days. In the end ABC managed to sort this out for us. | | It looks like the solution is to request replacement parts via ABC rather | than direct from NetApp (our hardware support contract is with ABC rather | than NetApp if I understand things correctly). I'm sure that ABC have | precisely the same problem. It is least however their problem rather than | anything to do with us.

Going slightly off thread topic here... we have often got the impression that relationships between Network Appliance and their resellers (we have worked through two such resellers over the years) are rather fraught.

We had great difficulty getting our registration at now.netapp.com updated properly this year after we had paid ABC, and it certainly seemed as if the problems weren't at the ABC end of the communications link.

Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.