Fun and Games and ISPs
Jun. 1st, 2002 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI've had a fucking awful year for ISPs.
First of all, the people that host the mail for ducker.org.uk managed to break the server. The mail started off hosted by UKhosts, who were taken over by Charis Internet, who are now part of Zetnet Internet Services. Nobody had gotten around to moving the mail accounts from the old Charis server to the new Zetnet ones, and they didn't have any spare parts around for a server they hadn't bought themselves. So when the server fried itself, it took 4 days of messing with before they decided it wasn't coming back up, and transferred all the accounts over to the new mail servers. And then it took another 24 hours for DNS to propagate. Fantastic, 5 days without mail.
Secondly, at work we were getting mail via SMTP. We'd dial into the ISP once every fifteen minutes and it would then dump all our mail onto our Exchange box. This worked fine, except that their servers would occasionally forget to release our IP address back into the pool when we dropped the connection, and we'd have to phone them up and explain carefully and slowly, what was wrong before they'd fix it. This all went horribly wrong when one day we couldn't dial into their servers at all. I phoned, fairly frequently, for the first day and was told "Ooh, there might be a problem, I'm not sure" followed by "It's a minor technical hitch, they're working on it." On day 2 (of no email for the business), they said "It's bigger than we thought, but we're still working on it" followed by "All the SMTP is down at the moment, but it should be back up by the end of the day". On day 3 I was finally told "It's going to be down for a few days", followed 3 hours later by "It's going to be down for at least 3 weeks, would you like to be set up with POP instead?" Seeing as Exchange doesn't support POP natively, this was going to mean adding in an additional component to our main email system with no warning, some cost and no testing time. But with 0 choice, we did it. When I phoned to complain and find out how long it was going to be before we got our SMTP back, I was told they were discontinuing that service. Which is just fantastic. I can see loads of large companies being ecstatic at having their SMTP cancelled on -3 days notice.
And then this morning, I couldn't access the internet. Or rather, nothing except MSN Messenger could. I eventually figured out that MSN Messenger uses hardwired IP addresses, and everything else uses host names to connect. So the fault was probably DNS related. A bit of testing with nslookup and ping proved that, but did bugger all to help me actually get my mail, news, etc. Eventually I ended up phoning my dad and asking him to ping my mail server and then tell me the IP address, so that I could change my settings to point directly at the IP address. Oh, and when I phoned the tech support at my ISP, I discovered that they don't answer phones (or email) except Mon-Fri 9-5, not including Bank Holidays. And as Monday and Tuesday this week are bank holidays, that would mean 4 days without usable internet. I kludged together a couple of options, and then started investigating the problem this evening, only to have it all suddenly start working again, a suspicious 5 minutes after I posted on the support newsgroups (I couldn't, of course, get onto the support newsgroups earler, not having the IP address of the news server).
Anyway.... I'm sincerely hoping that my various suppliers get their acts together, or I'm getting my own leased line in and selling on the bandwidth. I'm fed up with putting up with incompetent service providers who not only don't provide a service, but aren't even capable of being told that there's a problem at all because they either (a) don't care, (b) don't understand or (c) aren't in when problems actually occur.
First of all, the people that host the mail for ducker.org.uk managed to break the server. The mail started off hosted by UKhosts, who were taken over by Charis Internet, who are now part of Zetnet Internet Services. Nobody had gotten around to moving the mail accounts from the old Charis server to the new Zetnet ones, and they didn't have any spare parts around for a server they hadn't bought themselves. So when the server fried itself, it took 4 days of messing with before they decided it wasn't coming back up, and transferred all the accounts over to the new mail servers. And then it took another 24 hours for DNS to propagate. Fantastic, 5 days without mail.
Secondly, at work we were getting mail via SMTP. We'd dial into the ISP once every fifteen minutes and it would then dump all our mail onto our Exchange box. This worked fine, except that their servers would occasionally forget to release our IP address back into the pool when we dropped the connection, and we'd have to phone them up and explain carefully and slowly, what was wrong before they'd fix it. This all went horribly wrong when one day we couldn't dial into their servers at all. I phoned, fairly frequently, for the first day and was told "Ooh, there might be a problem, I'm not sure" followed by "It's a minor technical hitch, they're working on it." On day 2 (of no email for the business), they said "It's bigger than we thought, but we're still working on it" followed by "All the SMTP is down at the moment, but it should be back up by the end of the day". On day 3 I was finally told "It's going to be down for a few days", followed 3 hours later by "It's going to be down for at least 3 weeks, would you like to be set up with POP instead?" Seeing as Exchange doesn't support POP natively, this was going to mean adding in an additional component to our main email system with no warning, some cost and no testing time. But with 0 choice, we did it. When I phoned to complain and find out how long it was going to be before we got our SMTP back, I was told they were discontinuing that service. Which is just fantastic. I can see loads of large companies being ecstatic at having their SMTP cancelled on -3 days notice.
And then this morning, I couldn't access the internet. Or rather, nothing except MSN Messenger could. I eventually figured out that MSN Messenger uses hardwired IP addresses, and everything else uses host names to connect. So the fault was probably DNS related. A bit of testing with nslookup and ping proved that, but did bugger all to help me actually get my mail, news, etc. Eventually I ended up phoning my dad and asking him to ping my mail server and then tell me the IP address, so that I could change my settings to point directly at the IP address. Oh, and when I phoned the tech support at my ISP, I discovered that they don't answer phones (or email) except Mon-Fri 9-5, not including Bank Holidays. And as Monday and Tuesday this week are bank holidays, that would mean 4 days without usable internet. I kludged together a couple of options, and then started investigating the problem this evening, only to have it all suddenly start working again, a suspicious 5 minutes after I posted on the support newsgroups (I couldn't, of course, get onto the support newsgroups earler, not having the IP address of the news server).
Anyway.... I'm sincerely hoping that my various suppliers get their acts together, or I'm getting my own leased line in and selling on the bandwidth. I'm fed up with putting up with incompetent service providers who not only don't provide a service, but aren't even capable of being told that there's a problem at all because they either (a) don't care, (b) don't understand or (c) aren't in when problems actually occur.
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no subject
Date: 2002-06-01 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-02 04:09 am (UTC)And if you want a domain name, that costs, obviously.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-02 06:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-02 03:50 pm (UTC)I used to have a domain with UK2, but the fact that you can't call them up and shout at them when things go wrong is a bit of off-putting for me.
I do use their counter-strike servers a lot though.