I love when people use words that say nothing, and especially when they string them together into long-winded nothings;

2/23/2005 4:49:32 PM
DataCenter
Dear Customer,

We have received your reboot request and are now adding it to the queue of reboots to be performed. This process involves the power cycling of your server and will be completed in the order the ticket was received in our queue. If your server does not come back up on it’s own within a reasonable time period, the ticket will automatically be escalated to our investigations team who will then troubleshoot your issue and advise you of what steps they took or what further steps need to be taken.

Thank you,
Datacenter Support

You’ll note that there’s no promise of time, length of wait, or what to do next. It was hard enough recovering the login information and gaining control of the server in order to request a reboot. Let me tell you about shitty CSR practices at EV1SERVER.NET, and how they appear to be incapable of using the PHONE. Oh, you can call, but good luck connecting to the person you need to talk to; dropped calls, unprofessional call handling, and ringing phones that are instantly put on hold without saying a word (ie, you go from voice ads on the line, it rings, then dead air). Initially, the CSR (Chris) I reached said in a snotty tone “Well it would be much easier if I had a department number to forward you to…” Don’t you have a company intranet? A phone directory? How many Christian M.s do you have in the company?

Then I get access to the server control panel, and request the trouble ticket that I wanted … Reboot my server. I get the lovely email above, verbatiim.

A reboot that doesn’t occur within a reasonable time? For me, a reasonable reboot time is 5 minutes, and I’m sitting at 20 minutes… when does the server automatically notify their investigations team? Why am I even doing this for what appears to be a router failure? Why? first level support SAYS TO.

Thankfully he Customer Service person I eventually dealt with (Christian M.) via live chat was competant enough to use a phone and call me to verify our information, get us the required access, to allow us to get that reboot ticket in there… However, now I’m stuck with a server that’s in an unknown state – no idea if it’s up, down, rebooting, rebooted, or when the detective on staff at EV1 gets notified that something is amiss.

From ivhou-207-218-245-112.ev1.net (207.218.245.112) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
...
From ivhou-207-218-245-112.ev1.net (207.218.245.112) icmp_seq=297 Destination Host Unreachable

Useless.

I think I’ll have to forward a pointer to this over to Rober Marsh, CEO and Founder of Everyones Internet (EV1) headsurfer@ev1.net to let him know how they’ve lost our account.

Update:
In trying to get more information, I spoke with Hollie F. on live chat, seeing as I don’t trust myself to keep my voice calm and rational after 2 hours, and I don’t trust their phone support people to be able to forward calls accurately.

[16:57:45] me: trying to determine when someone will wander over and look at my server.
[16:58:10] Hollie F : sir you need to be patient and wait for our datacenter technicians to reboot the server
[16:58:18] Hollie F : there is nothing i can do about this
[16:58:59] me: I’ve been patient for the past 3 hours. I’m still patient, and I’m not saying that you’re personally responsible, but I’d like to know what hte queue looks like.
[16:59:17] Hollie F : they have a very high queue today
[16:59:29] Hollie F : so it’s causing a delay and they are trying t heir best to get to all the tickets
[16:59:33] Hollie F : please give our techs time to get to it
[16:59:44] me: Ie, will everyone here on my marketting team continue to climb all over me about this for the next hour, or all day tomorrow too?
[17:00:26] me: My point is simply that the datacenter email is useless in giving me any real data, and I’d realy appreciate having some real data.
[17:01:21] Hollie F : they are investigating the server right now
[17:02:55] me: Yes, I see that on the ticket now.
[17:03:17] me: How deep is their queue?
[17:04:12] Hollie F : i’m sorry there’s no way i can tell how deep the queue is since i do not have access to it, all i know is it’s really busy for them today
[17:04:29] me: I can imagine it is.
[17:05:10] me: Basically what you’re saying is that if I don’t hear anything in the next 30 minutes, there’s nothing you can do from here regardless?

Update 2:
Note my original ping to www.domainname.com;
From ivhou-207-218-245-112.ev1.net (207.218.245.112) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

Note my new ping to www.domainname.com;
64 bytes from ev1s-66-98-136-88.ev1servers.net (66.98.136.88): icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=193 ms

They closed the ticket saying “There was an error in the configuration of your server’s ip. This error has been corrected and your server is now online with ssh access. closing ticket.”

This isn’t something that we changed, so where did the change originate?

Update 3:

The server is alive (well, returning pings), and the techs closed the ticket because SSH is working. Turns out it isn’t, and we’re unable to auth with the login info that we have on file. Did they even test it before closing the ticket?

So, I’m back in Live Chat with Kelvin C, and the chat application is having issues; that or Kelvin’s fielding a dozen live chats at once and not splicing his time between windows very efficiently.

The response from the techs regarding the mysterious IP change is that “There appears to have been a typo in your server’s ifcfg-eth0 file. It’s possible that this could have occured during the investigation of your server.”

So, they might have changed something and broke the server? Well, if the IP address was changed, it wasn’t from our end. Did they migrate us to another network and not tell us? Our DNS hasn’t changed, so it would have to be an internal problem on their end.

Their response to us stating that we can’t login via SSH? “We are forwarding this issue to our supervisor for further investigation.”

This gets worse and worse, as the chat dumps me out, and I have to start all over again.

Update 4:
As I was chatting with Kelvin, the ticket was closed again, stating simply “DataCenter
server back online, all sites and services responding” What the hell kind of response is that? Tell me WHY SSH wasn’t working; was this the result of the network reconfiguration that appears to have taken place? Have we been hacked? Can your Data Center people identify a computer at ten paces? 3 hours from the point we requested that the server be restarted, and we’re back up and running. Amazing.