As you may have noticed, our servers have been really crappy for a while now. This has made me very unhappy, not just because I think you're all really swell folks, but because it has also meant that the first thing I do in the morning after pouring a cup of coffee is mutter to Lauren about crappy ISPs, and then wander over to my machine in the corner to issue the morning reboot request.
This has been a royal pain in my ass.
This chapter of the saga began at the end of April, when I finally moved the Goats machines out of my living room. That made me happy. Less happy was that the ISP we moved to, fucking interland, gave us crappy hardware. Less happy still, is that they refused to acknowledge this. There was a huge amount of comedy involved, but most of it involved charging me to test hardware, and then letting me know afterwards that although they didn't find any problems, the specific hardware I had told them I suspected was faulty wasn't included in the tests. (I know it was a hardware issue, because we paid for a second web server, configured it exactly like the first web server, and one crashed every day while the other stayed solid. We've had the first one generally out of service for a long time now, but for the brief periods when I had to put it into service, it dies within a day while the second (no hardware issue) server stays up. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to make some inferences from this kind of behavior.)
In a way, I feel that they're a lot like Dell. As long as your computer isn't having major problems, they're very friendly and helpful. But once it moves a little past what they have personal knowledge of, the support strategy moves to the "if I keep them on hold long enough, maybe they'll go away" strategy. You know you're in trouble when the sales person stops returning your calls.
Long story slightly shorter, we moved. Long story slightly shorter, we're still moving. I'm away next week, so I wanted the web server to be stable for you, but don't have time to relocate/reconfigure the 5-10 separate applications that comprise a mail server.
Our new ISP is VOXROX. So far, my interactions with their tech people have been uniformly positive. Their internal LAN set-up is superior and more secure, and their web interface for managing our machines is definitely significantly better as well. (The main thing is that we can directly reboot/power-cycle the machines instead of waiting for a support person to get around to it, saving us 45 minutes of downtime per request if we have more issues.)
I hate doing sysadmin work. They're running Debian instead of RedHat, so I've had to learn new stuff again, which is always difficult for my aging, abused neurons. I also always move/set-up servers under the assumption that it will be the last time I ever need to do it from scratch, which means I never keep notes, and I inevitably miss something. There will be issues. Bear with us. Once we're done, and I can work for 6-8 hours without being interrupted by having to reboot the server, hopefully some of the other projects we have in line will get done faster.
