{"id":339,"date":"2006-05-16T11:50:28","date_gmt":"2006-05-16T10:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caliban.org\/wp\/2006\/05\/16\/wankers\/"},"modified":"2006-05-16T11:50:28","modified_gmt":"2006-05-16T10:50:28","slug":"wankers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/2006\/05\/wankers\/","title":{"rendered":"Wankers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes: wankers. Wankers! WANKERS! WANKERS!<\/strong> __WANKERS!__<\/font><\/p>\n\n

Who am I talking about? Managed.com<\/a>, of course, the<\/p>\n\n

company to which I give good money each month to host this site.<\/p>\n\n

What happened?<\/p>\n\n

Well, managed.com decided to move its network from California to New Jersey.<\/p>\n\n

At least, that’s as much as they told us, the paying customers.<\/p>\n\n

In preparation for this, they sent all of their customers an e-mail asking to<\/p>\n\n

be supplied with the customer’s root password via plain text e-mail. For those<\/p>\n\n

of you who aren’t in the field of computer system and network administration,<\/p>\n\n

let me state that this is a violation of one of the most basic and universally<\/p>\n\n

lauded principles of the profession: never, under any circumstances, send<\/p>\n\n

passwords in the clear.<\/p>\n\n

And yet, my hosting provider was asking me to do just this. In hindsight, that<\/p>\n\n

should have been enough to spur me into action. I should have found another<\/p>\n\n

hosting provider, right there and then, and moved my data prior to the<\/p>\n\n

migration. But I decided to wait until after the migration to seek a better<\/p>\n\n

provider. As always, laziness, compounded by a failure to recognise the<\/p>\n\n

urgency of the situation, won out.<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, managed.com were supposed to back-up their customers’ data, firstly<\/p>\n\n

with a full back-up and then, shortly before the migration, with a further<\/p>\n\n

incremental back-up. The migration was supposed to be barely noticeable, with<\/p>\n\n

a guaranteed maximum of two hours of downtime.<\/p>\n\n

I was sceptical, but kept my fingers crossed.<\/p>\n\n

Can you believe that managed.com didn’t tell its customers in their<\/p>\n\n

notification e-mail when this migration would actually take place? We were<\/p>\n\n

left to guess. E-mails to them on the subject went unanswered, as did requests<\/p>\n\n

for a secure channel through which to supply one’s root password.<\/p>\n\n

When I noticed one day that my machine had been rebooted without my<\/p>\n\n

permission, I incorrectly assumed the migration had already taken place. If<\/p>\n\n

I’d known at that time that things would be moving to New Jersey, not just<\/p>\n\n

around the corner in California, I could have run a traceroute and seen that<\/p>\n\n

my machine had not actually gone anywhere. At that time, however, I thought<\/p>\n\n

they were just moving locally. What else could I think? Managed.com had told<\/p>\n\n

me virtually nothing in their e-mail.<\/p>\n\n

caliban.org mysteriously went off the network on 9th May. It remained<\/p>\n\n

inaccessible for almost three days. So much for the two hours of guaranteed<\/p>\n\n

downtime.<\/p>\n\n

All of my e-mails to managed.com went unanswered in this period. Only when I<\/p>\n\n

threatened them with legal action (a trick I picked up in America), did they<\/p>\n\n

finally respond by rebooting the machine and getting it back on-line.<\/p>\n\n

Naïvely, I thought that would be an end to my problems. Yes, that was<\/p>\n\n

very naïve of me.<\/p>\n\n

You see, managed.com restored my service from a week old back-up. I’ve no idea<\/p>\n\n

what happened to the promised incremental back-up. It was probably never made<\/p>\n\n

and, even if it was, it would have had to be of the last week’s worth of data,<\/p>\n\n

not just the day before the migration. I suspect it was never even made,<\/p>\n\n

however.<\/p>\n\n

The net effect? I found I was missing a week’s worth of e-mail, multiple DNS<\/p>\n\n

changes had been lost, the last week’s worth of blog entries had effectively<\/p>\n\n

never been written, and sundry other less serious issues now needed to be<\/p>\n\n

fixed, such as recent software updates becoming undone.<\/p>\n\n

More e-mails to managed.com went unanswered. Due to an oversight on my part,<\/p>\n\n

my own off-site back-ups had not taken place in recent times, so I had no<\/p>\n\n

private back-up from which I could recover my data. Typical.<\/p>\n\n

I began work on the system to repair the damage my hosting provider had done<\/p>\n\n

to it, but before I could achieve very much, the system went down again. The<\/p>\n\n

system was off-line again for more than a day. Once again, e-mail threats were<\/p>\n\n

required to get it back on-line.<\/p>\n\n

So what’s going on?<\/p>\n\n

Exploration of my system’s log messages shows that the new hardware on which<\/p>\n\n

my data resides is not the same as the old. For one thing, the system has a<\/p>\n\n

different Ethernet card. Now, either that card is flaky or the Linux driver<\/p>\n\n

for it is, because the system regularly gives up the ghost and all but<\/p>\n\n

crashes: TCP connections to open ports hang without response; processes can no<\/p>\n\n

longer be forked; even syslogging stops.<\/p>\n\n

Yet, even if the new hardware had presented no problems, it’s inconceivable<\/p>\n\n

that a company would move a working Linux (or any other) system to new<\/p>\n\n

hardware and just expect it to work. What if I had not had the driver for the<\/p>\n\n

new network card compiled for my kernel? My machine would have had absolutely<\/p>\n\n

no way of ever getting back onto the network after the migration. It’s sheer<\/p>\n\n

luck that I can sometimes still log into my machine and that it’s not<\/p>\n\n

completely dead to the world.<\/p>\n\n

So, the networking on the new hardware is extremely unreliable. rsyncs<\/p>\n\n

regularly fail with checksum errors. The more network traffic one pumps over<\/p>\n\n

the interface, the more such errors occur. Eventually, the system becomes<\/p>\n\n

unstable and eventually unreachable.<\/p>\n\n

It’s also possible that the machine has bad RAM or ineffective cooling, either<\/p>\n\n

at the CPU or the data centre level. Witness these messages, culled from my<\/p>\n\n

log in a rare moment of accessibility.<\/p>\n\n

May 15 06:39:58 ulysses CPU0: Temperature above threshold<\/p>\n\n

May 15 06:39:58 ulysses CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode<\/p>\n\n

The system is now on heavy-duty medication: cold reboots, at first twice<\/p>\n\n

daily, but that proved inadequate, so cron now reboots the machine every hour.<\/p>\n\n

That’s the only way to avoid the machine locking up completely, which then<\/p>\n\n

puts me at the mercy of managed.com to reboot it. That’s something that now<\/p>\n\n

seems to take more than 24 hours to accomplish.<\/p>\n\n

Clearly, this appalling state of affairs can’t be allowed to continue, so I’m<\/p>\n\n

already on the look-out for alternative hosting providers.<\/p>\n\n

A year ago, when I selected this company to host my services, people seemed<\/p>\n\n

happy with it. I, too, was happy with the service until earlier this year. In<\/p>\n\n

the last couple of months, however, things have been going downhill, which is<\/p>\n\n

never a good portent for the future. Nevertheless, I was not prepared for what<\/p>\n\n

has now befallen me. These people are lacking even the most basic system<\/p>\n\n

administration skills.<\/p>\n\n

So, what happened? Well, a little research shows that managed.com is not<\/p>\n\n

really performing a migration. The hard drives and the data have moved to the<\/p>\n\n

other side of the country, yes, but not because managed.com is doing it. No,<\/p>\n\n

managed.com has been sold, you see? My data now turns out to be at the mercy<\/p>\n\n

of Web Host Plus<\/a>, so the current disaster is<\/p>\n\n

actually largely due to their mismanagement and incompetence.<\/p>\n\n

In fact, it turns out that a great many people are in a [similar or even worse<\/p>\n\n

state](http:\/\/www.webhostingtalk.com\/showthread.php?t=508358), thanks to this<\/p>\n\n

bunch of clowns.<\/p>\n\n

Sixty-three<\/a><\/p>\n\n

pages of utter misery and appalling professional disregard of one’s customers<\/p>\n\n

come to light.<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, to say that I am in the market for a new hosting provider is an<\/p>\n\n

understatement. If you have any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them.<\/p>\n\n

Ideally, they should not be located in the US, due to that country’s Draconian<\/p>\n\n

legal stance with regard to privacy.<\/p>\n\n

Thanks to Google<\/a>, I was able to rescue the missing<\/p>\n\n

blog entries from the Google<\/p>\n\n

cache<\/a>. I had to add back<\/p>\n\n

the article comments by hand, which caused the loss of the original time of<\/p>\n\n

entry, but at least the text of the article itself has been recovered.<\/p>\n\n

The week of missing e-mail, on the other hand, is simply gone. Calls to<\/p>\n\n

Web Host Plus to make available the missing incremental back-up simply fall on<\/p>\n\n

deaf ears.<\/p>\n\n

I’m utterly appalled to experience first-hand how this company has lost my<\/p>\n\n

data and now ignores my complaints. I’m left bewildered as to the precise<\/p>\n\n

ratio of incompetence to deliberate professional disregard, but I am 100% sure<\/p>\n\n

that I have to get my data away from this bunch of wankers as soon as I<\/p>\n\n

possibly can.<\/p>\n\n

Until that time, expect the server to be up and down like a yo-yo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes: wankers. Wankers! WANKERS! WANKERS! __WANKERS!__ Who am I talking about? Managed.com, of course, the company to which I give good money each month to host this site. What happened? Well, managed.com decided to move its network from California to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caliban.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}