Category: Snippet

*snippet* Despite me pulling practically 36 hours straight at a keyboard due to the failure of the upgrade to our datacentres (I managed to grab a single hours sleep in that time period), I’m still getting a number of technical support queries and fault reports: I spent over 6 hours restoring a server from scratch and all customer data (longest amount of downtime we’ve had ever to my knowledge) and now it appears all the site administrator passwords weren’t backed up correctly. I’m having to reset them all by hand 🙁

Not fun at all. That and “nursing” the server has taken up most of my time recently (the restored datacentre peaked at load averages of over 60 yesterday after another reboot – to reinitalise the SSL system – and I had to watch it for 2 hours to ensure it settled) hence the unfortunately lack of blog entries.

I’m hoping the technical helpdesk will calm down shortly (we’ve got nine open calls at the moment and our “average” is one: I try and ensure it’s cleared on a Friday afternoon by emailing all people with open calls on a Wednesday morning for a “status update”), and I’m be able to resume normal blogging levels.

Now, if only I could find out what in the Ensim Pro upgrade would cause it to totally crash a server during the upgrade process (despite us testing the upgrade extensively before hand) 🙁

Not fun.

*snippet* I’m on tenterhooks at the moment: I’m currently upgrading our servers to the latest version of Ensim Pro and Linux and, as per any large server upgrade, I’m scared in case anything goes wrong. Especially since it’s a live system hosting customer data. I’m performing the upgrade on our second datacentre first as that’s only got around 200 sites hosted on it: centres 1+3 have around 400.

*snippet* My parents are currently in Tunisia having a holiday and they gave me a quick call around 8pm for a chat. Which I did so: answering the phone in my bedroom (as I’m normally upstairs anyway). Bad move, as I was chatting, I rested on my bed and as soon as they had gone I drifted off into slumberland. Aaargh, “I don’t believe I wanted to do that”. Woke up at 11pm with my computer announcing that a TV programme was on that I wanted to watch: so quick rush to clean cat bowl, let cat out, have dinner, watch programme, let cat back in, check helpdesk for work and now I’m back to bed.

Work, sleep, Work, sleep: It’s all I ever seem to do at the moment (well and play Sim related games 😉 ).

*snippet* Need sleep. Need to update Guess that movie. Need to update new websites. Need to block all inbound traffic to machine that has the three letters s-i-m anywhere in it.

I got home from work and I actually thought I’d done some “personal work” done: but I instantly find an online s-i-m game – I was going to blog about it but it’s slightly adult orientated and definitely has an Adult theme at the end. Personally, I think it’ll be a better game if it wasn’t for that unnecessary “hard Adult content” at the end but… If you want to play it, you’ll have to AltaVista (or, if you prefer, Google 😀 ) for “sim girl” on ebaumsworld, flashradium or newgrounds ….

*snippet* Aaargghhh! Luuuseerrs!

Yep, it’s been “one of those days” where I’m just going to be using this blog as a “location for letting off steam”. And the fact that my job would be so much easier if we didn’t have customers to worry about *grr* Unfortunately, they pay the wages so 🙁

Basically, we’ve had to make a few configuration changes in anticipation of a major systems upgrade across our network of servers: nowt too bad you would think. Except, as with any major computer changes, there are bound to be a few minor hiccups (even Slashdot suffers from them when they move/upgrade servers: and they are “techy techys”!). Of the 400+ customers which were affected by this weeks changes, less than a dozen of them noticed the changes (I was actually aiming for none of them).

However, whilst most of that few dozen were content just to let things “reset” themselves (the .uk zone file seems to be delayed with making its updates: hence has caused us a few problems), we’ve got a couple of “vocal customers” that are reporting “major problems: critical: fix now” type messages. I’m extremely good on customer support (I’ve often been told I’m “too good”), but we run a very tight budget and hence I have to be careful how I regulate my time and try not to “over service” customers too much. However, I’m more than willing to go out of my way to people paying £50, £100, £1,000 per year to help them.

But those aren’t the people that are complaining. Oh no. The people that are complaining are the ones that got totally free webhosting with their domain name registration (I’ve seen our rivals selling “webhosting+domain name” for £40 a year: we do domain name registrations for less than £20 and “throw in” a free webhosting account). Yep: the customers which we don’t make any money from are the ones that are complaining especially “the web is important to my business so the site needs to be running”: in that case, spend more than £20 on your website hosting! If it is “really critical”, then find someone offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) etc: but you will have to pay – several hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds for that level of guaranteed service!

Aaargh!

(rant over)