Archive for the ‘Rants and Not-So-Rants’ Category
Singing the Praises of Microsoft?!
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
It’s not all that often I have anything great to say about Microsoft… but today brought a particularly good experience. Given that I’m pretty quick to jump on the soap box and start complaining when something is wrong, it seems only fair to sing praises when something is right.
Today, I was forced to install Service Pack 1 to the Vista machine on which I do most of my development work. I typically don’t install service packs unless it’s absolutely necessary (SP installs usually = downtime fixing things), but since SP1 is a requirement for Adobe CS4 (I’ll complain about that later), installing the service pack became necessary evil.
My first attempt at installing was the failure I expected… Windows made it to stage 3 of the installation, and then stalled at about 75%. Life was bad, and I had visions of never being able to use that machine again (I’m being dramatic there… one can always reformat and start over).
I went to the Microsoft site looking for help, and after going through all of the KB articles and not finding the fix, I submitted a support request. Quite honestly, I was expecting to find that support would be an endless chain of emails with people who didn’t understand the problem. To my surprise (and to my pleasure), I was immediately directed into a chat session with a real, live support person. Even more to my surprise, the support tech initiated an “Easy Care” session, jumped on to my desktop, and fixed the problem for me. Really… no fooling… the guy just fixed it, and his manager called me half an hour later to make sure everything was working.
I am simply floored by the experience. Whoever is running the show at MS support is really on their game today.
I thought I’d never say this, but it appears that Adobe could learn a few things from Microsoft. Seems a bit backward when I can get immediate, one-to-one support with a well qualified tech for a $300 operating system, but I can’t even get an email response to support requests for $4500 server software.
Do you Yahoo!?: If you use Yahoo Mail I can’t write to you, again.
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
A couple of years ago, I had problems with emails to Yahoo! addresses getting rejected. It wasn’t anything I was doing, it was just Yahoo being Yahoo. If you Google “Yahoo mail deferred”, you’ll see that this is nothing uncommon, and Yahoo black/greylists legitimate senders regularly in the name of “spam management”.
When it happened, Yahoo had me jump through all sorts of hoops (by “jump I mean “fill out” and by “hoops” I mean “forms”, and by “forms” I mean the same form over and over again) so they could make their decision whether I am worthy to send email to their users. It took weeks of back and forth (after the initial two week wait for someone to respond to my request in the first place), and was a little aggravating, but the Yahoo machine fixed it, so all was well for a time
This week, I’m suffering deja vu. Suddenly, all of my emails to Yahoo! addresses are being returned with this lovely error:
451 Message temporarily deferred - [70]
…which is the same one I was getting from them the first time around. I’m not a spammer, my mailserver is not an open relay, I have reverse DNS set up, and I don’t send any bulk email. My server resends every 40 minutes when errors other than fatals are returned on the previous attempt. There are 4 email addresses on my mailserver, all connected directly to my properly configured domain. I check my SMTP logs weekly looking for anything problematic, and there never is.
GMail, Hotmail, a bevy of ISPs… none of them have a problem with me, it’s just Yahoo. This time around, I just can’t / won’t / ain’t gonna run the gauntlet again, so I’m going to give Yahoo “the big whatever” and just let it lie. If it means I never send another message to a Yahoo account, I guess life will go on.
So, if you use your Yahoo account to email me and never get a response, know that it’s not because I don’t love you, it’s because Yahoo doesn’t love me.
Houston H1 Goes Supernova: ThePlanet’s Datacenter Transformer Explosion
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
Saturday at about 4pm (EST) my server host, ThePlanet.com experienced a major disaster at their Houston TX H1 datacenter. Apparently, a transformer in one of their electrical equipment rooms exploded, taking out most of the power infrastructure of the datacenter (as well as the walls surrounding the equipment room).
For those not familiar with ThePlanet, they are one of the biggest providers of dedicated servers in the US… with 5 datacenters serving upwards of 20,000 customers (that’s direct customers, not considering the hundreds of thousands of reseller accounts making up a million+ domains on their network). I currently have two servers with ThePlanet, and as luck would have it, they are both in ThePlanet’s H1 datacenter in Houston, TX. As a result, my servers were down all weekend, and just came back on yesterday evening. Power is still a bit shaky, and I’ve read reports that some of the phases of the datacenter are still up and down. It’s scary to think that there are portions of the datacenter currently relying on portable generators (the kind that are in a semi trailer… not the little Honda generators you get at Home Depot, silly).
Here are the good things I have to say about the incident:
- ThePlanet reports that nobody was hurt, and that in itself is a miracle. If you’ve ever seen a large (5+ Mw) transformer blow at an outdoor transfer station, you know what sort of power we’re talking about. Now imagine that happening indoors, and the destruction it would (and did) cause. Had anyone been near it during the event, that person wouldn’t be with us anymore… so thank whatever diety or statue you bow to for that fact that nobody was within harm’s reach that day.
- The Planet is doing everything they can to put the pieces back together as fast as possible… but…
Here are the bad things I have to say:
- ThePlanet really dropped the ball when it comes to handling support tickets and calls surrounding the event. Although I’m sure they are being flooded with support requests right now, it’s their job to see them through immediately, regardless of whether that means calling in every one of their support people to work 12 hour shifts. We’re not talking about some itty-bitty hosting company here, were talking about 5 major datacenters pulling in millions of dollars a month in hosting fees.
- When the tickets do get responded to, I’m getting canned responses that don’t actually answer the question or solve the problem. That, friends, is just unacceptable.
- The canned responses provide comments about what the customer can do to fix problems for himself/herself. For example, the nameservers in the H1 datacenter are now borked, so the customer servers using those nameservers simply cannot resolve domain names. Although changing nameservers not a major undertaking for an experienced server manager, it still pisses me off when someone I pay for a service fails, and then tells me to go fix it myself.
- I understand that nobody can plan for every contingency, but really, to have the potential for a single event to take out an entire datacenter (we’re talking 9000 servers here) is insane. I would think that a facility of that calibre would have enough redundancy in place to get back up within 24 hours, regardless of the magnitude of the event
Things I’ve learned from this event
- Having both of my servers in the same datacenter, is a really bad idea.
- I need to move one of my servers to another datacenter, and run a “worst case failure” backup from my office. That way, I’ll still at least get my email.
- I should feel lucky that my servers are both on the floor of the DC that got power back first. My understanding is that other customers are not as lucky.
- I need to evalulate whether this is something that warrants moving to another hosting provider. ThePlanet has been good to me for the past 5 years, but this whole mess has really shaken my confidence.
- I need to be thankful that my servers are intact. While the datacenter’s electrical infrastructure was seriously damaged, my servers are unharmed (ThePlanet has reported that no customer servers were damaged during the event).
- I need to be thankful that I don’t work for ThePlanet’s support department… life must be really tough for those guys and gals right about now.
Mac Mini: The Ultimate Windows Recovery Tool
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
I’ve always been a Windows guy. I don’t have anything against Macs (they sure are pretty), and I can see why people who like them really like them, but my one (and only) attempt at making the switch to being a Mac hipster turned out to be an exercise in lost time. So for now, I’m still Bill’s bi-otch. I’m the first to agree that Windows sucks, but I’m familiar with how it sucks, so at least I can usually anticipate when it’s going to suck really badly.
Not long after that one time Mac-tryin’ session, one of my Windows machines went nuts. Now, I’m used to this sort of thing (like I said, I know Windows sucks), but this time around was a little different than I was used to.
Rather than loading windows, the machine was just giving me a great, big cursor. It was funny at first, as the cursor filled almost all of the screen. But, once I realized this was going to happen forever, the humor was lost pretty fast.
Since I’m used to Windows going south every now and then, I usually have a backup machine ready to go. Unforutnately, that wasn’ t the case this time around, as this machine was just a couple months old (serves me right for buying anything in a box that looks like a cow), and I was still in the process of moving files around, so there were files on the dead machine that I needed to get to.
After pulling the drive out of the dead machine and dropping it into a USB enclosure, I expected my other Windows machine to read the disk and let me copy my files. No such luck. To my dismay, none of my Windows machines could read it. Life was bad.
As I calmed myself enough to start calculating how long it would take to reconstuct all of those lost files, my Mac Mini, still sitting on the corner of my desk from that adventure into OSX-land, caught my eye. Could it really be that simple? Was Apple about to earn every penny of that $600 ? Turns out that it could… and the Mac read the drive and let me recover everything. Life was good again.
The moral of the story… get a Mac, if for no other reason than to make your bad day good again when Windows goes stupid on you (and you know it will).