The MassLinux Disappearance Explained

Just recently we had a piece commenting on how many people were wondering where MassLinux had gone. Emmett Plant, at LinuxToday, has got the story. In an interview, Emmett talks with MassLinux' Todd Lauder about the whole situation and how people can expect to get their information back from MassLinux.

Comments

half assed explanation

[platypus]

Does anybody else really believe his explanation why they will not continue the service??? It doesn't sound convincing to me.
And why the hell didn't they just send another cheque and then find out what happened with the first?
My theory is they got in financial problems, the money thing went wrong and they hadn't enough money to just pay again (they would have got the other first money back).
Then they were cut from the net and decided not to continue the business as it didn't pay out anyway, after all that was a business modell which now just seems to have failed.

Re:half assed explanation

[spurious cowherd]

ummmm.....let's give they guy the benift of the doubt here. I'll resere judgment until I see all the facts from both sides

Re:half assed explanation

[tlauder]

3 payments were sent to the ISP, they were all cashed, they called us up asking for 3 payments. We didn't have the cash to send them, the never told us they were going to shut off the line, they said they were looking into the billing problem, then they cut us off....

Re:half assed explanation

[handorf]

What, they should pay all their bills twice?

I know I don't have enough cash-on-hand to do that, do you? I doubt most companies could do that.

Re:half assed explanation

[Zico]

Sorry, but giving people the benefit of the doubt is not allowed here at Slashdot. You must instantly assume the worst about their motives, and attack them until they beg for mercy in a press release.

Oh wait, it's a Linux company. Nevermind. :)

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

Re:half assed explanation

[humphrm]

I must admit, there's something about the tenor of the explanation that indicates that this ship was bound to sink eventually anyway.

I do stringer work for a tiny web hoster too. It's not really good money, for him or me. I basically get my site hosted for free plus some sweat equity "if it ever takes off" in return for doing the guy's virtual Apache admin stuff. Now he's mostly doing design & marketting. He never gets paid, and if everyone paid him on time he might eke out a slim margin. And if he makes one mistake, it could mean not being able to pay his upline at all this month.

My point is, I don't blame MassLinux but the bottom line is that someone made a mistake. Hey, mistakes happen. It's just not very conducive to profit in the slim world of hosting.

Re:half assed explanation

[platypus]

Ok, sorry I didn't want to be harsh to you (english is not my first language)...
But why don't you just continue your service?
If I were your client, I would really stay and that's what I don't get. Why are you so sure that all your reputation is lost?

Re:half assed explanation

[platypus]

What, they should pay all their bills twice?
Because when you do business, your business partner isn't responsible for failures of your bank.
Though I know learned they weren't informed that their provider didn't announce the cut-off, that is not very nice, too.
But my point stands that the explanation for not continuing their service is not very convincing.

Re:half assed explanation

[spurious cowherd]

AHH!...now I understand. Forgive this larva's error.

/me gets out the BFG & prepares to flame everything in sight

Re:half assed explanation

[platypus]

I didn't assume the worst, it's just the other way around, well kindoff. They seemed to do a good job in hosting free project homepages, and I just don't get why they now are so sure they have lost all their reputation.
If I were their client I wouldn't loose my faith in them and continue to do business with them.
Shit happens, surviving as a cheap provider isn't easy and this incindent sound plausible, so tell people what went wrong and move on. No need to totally stop your business.

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "Time flies like a clock, fruit flies like a banana." - G. Marx

Re:half assed explanation

[handorf]

I think they probably won't continue service because nobody would ever trust them.

Would you go with a hosting service who got the most press when they went down? Regardless of if it was their fault or not. I probably wouldn't.

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree - it sounds like a total lie to me. If the checks were misdirected or intercepted, why didn't they get past due notices? If they did get past due notices, they could have made a fuss, traced the checks, and squared away the problem. More likely, they wrote 3 rubber checks, and the plug was pulled after the third bounce.

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

Because when you do business, your business partner isn't responsible for failures of your bank.

Right... except that the problem was with the cashing of the check, which means that it was not MassLinux's bank that caused the problem, it was their ISP's bank .

As far as not continuing service, I do have to admit it is a bit weak, however, think about it:

• They no longer have decent internet access (a cable modem isn't going to cut it for 800 domains).
• They paid twice for their ISP bill, which means that they had little $$ left to go to a new ISP.
• They were down for, what, 2 weeks? I think thereputation was hosed at that point.

Although, you have to admit, they could continue on.. crippled or not. Their user base did not dissolve entirely.

IMHO, they played the game wrong by keeping quiet about the whole thing for so long. Yes, it is embarassing, but it is better to have an informed customer base than to keep them guessing the worst..

Re:half assed explanation

[Cramer]

Having previously worked for an ISP (for four years), I can tell you with certainty that this sort of shit happens every day. The problem is -- and I'm not raggin' on the accounting workers -- the highly motivated, commited (and commitABLE) people in charge of the servers, routers, and other hardware are not the people in charge of the accounting.

Most accounting types couldn't tell the difference between HTML and C++. They speak a different language and live in a different world than us uber-geeks. They do only what they are paid to do and generally nothing more. There's certainly a great deal of detachment -- sysadmins tend to care more for their machine than their own children (assuming they ever have any :-))

And to make things worse, there's usually very little linkage between accounting and engineering. One speaks chinese and the other dutch so there's no big debate why this is. Thus, accounting puts a flag beside some customer's name in a database somewhere to indicate "terminate." The engineer has scripts that pick those entries out and turn them off -- poof, account terminated.

Where I used to work, the accounting drones required EVERYONE to report every second spent doing company work -- I guess they had some notion of "billable hours." This made no sense to those of us salaried employees, but we recorded it anyway. When they saw how much time we spent, voluntarily mind you, there was a collect jaw-drop that shook the building. The whole notion of "working from home" and "the need to access the network from home" were worse than prison to them. (Yet they still wanted every damned thing in the network to be 100% every second of the day and shit kittens when it wasn't.)

[FWIW, telco's have similar problems, altho' much less frequently.]

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

Please submit a story on the final outcome. Name names if possible. Please. I would like to know who not to do business with and so would quite a few other people. What would really suck is if even one of your previous customers wound up hosting with the company that cut you off.

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, this whole thing about accountants vs wireheads... it all made more sense to me when I realized this:

So there's a sizable number of folks in this country who hold a considerable amount of power over everyone else. Not, as a rule, the most well-socialized of folks, they have tendencies to speak about their profession at length amongst birds of their feather, often speaking their own externally incomprehensible jargon...

In short, bean-counters are pretty geeky. Just... it's usually mutually incompatible geekishness. Insurance folks are the same way, only better on those 'soft skills' my manager's always on me about.

Re:half assed explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

And banks do not generally have the smartest people working for them, either. Banks don't pay too much, you see, so the people who work for them do so because they want to be "bankers" and not for any other reason (they aren't normally paid too much). Think this through -- if your position was most important to you (not money), you would be careful what you did to damage your position. Now imagine some seriously pissed off geek coming into your branch saying that a)he has a serious accounting problem that the bank caused, b)he has spent a week on the phone with lots of people (who are as motivated to take ownership of the problem as you are)(and as poorly paid), c)he wants his money back NOW. You will stall him and kick the problem upstairs, where someone as unmotivated will sit on it a little longer. If this is 85% of the cash your company has, that is a pretty damned big problem, because the bank may take six months to "find" the money (i.e., for the problem to go uphill enough to be fixed by someone who isn't worried about being fired).

I have watched two friends have to get attorneys to recover money that everyone, including the banks in question, agreed had been misplaced. And then take the time to get the banks to pay their attorney fees. The only reason why this lasted this long was because the banks had no reason to move quickly. They were (until a month or two ago) essentuially protected and immune from pissed off customers. Think of the last time that you tried to get your insurer to pay up. Same deal. This is why I have been using either a broker or the cheapest bank I can for the last seven years -- you can get both to move very quickly.

The explanation sounded way to familiar. It is a pity. I hope that they recover damaged equal to the value of a going concern for a few years as well as attorney fees and the money.

We're SORRY?

[lyonsj]

Well folks, thats the whole story ...Masslinux is sorry That's what Todd Lauder has to say. I don't know, at this point, I think a little grovelling is in order - but then again, I don't suppose they care anymore, because they don't have any customers left, because they're not coming back. They say they're going to refund the money, but given that they haven't even bothered to personally contact their customers yet, I'm not keeping my fingers crossed. Todd didn't feel comfortable giving out his email because he was afraid he'd get flamed. Well, I wouldn't flame him, but I do want to know what the hell is up when I'm paying someone for a service and that service is cut off. And if he (or anyone else related to masslinux) gets flamed, well, can anyone at this point say they don't deserve it?

Re:We're SORRY?

[lyonsj]

OK, you know, I reread my comment and I think I need to clarify something.

I said that they deserved to get flamed, if someone flamed them, which I still think is partly true. I do understand how much it must utterly SUCK to have had three checks cashed and not get credit for them (hey, I've had to deal with NSI ;)), and I don't blame them for the fact that their ISP acted in a stupid manner. I feel sorry for them, on that count. They shouldn't get the flack for their ISP being dumb.

But there was an opportunity after they were cut off for them to act in a responsible and professional manner towards their paying customers, and they failed, repeatedly, to take that opportunity. Instead of stepping forward and explaining the situation right away (even through a story on /.), they let rumors fly and people were left hanging for a week before we even saw a question on /. They should have sent email and let their customers know what was going on. That's where I feel masslinux was way in the wrong, and I feel that the customers deserved a contact address that worked way before now - 2 weeks after the fact.

Re:We're SORRY?

[UncleRoger]

But there was an opportunity after they were cut off for them to act in a responsible and professional manner towards their paying customers, and they failed, repeatedly, to take that opportunity. Instead of stepping forward and explaining the situation right away (even through a story on /.), they let rumors fly and people were left hanging for a week before we even saw a question on /. They should have sent email and let their customers know what was going on. That's where I feel masslinux was way in the wrong, and I feel that the customers deserved a contact address that worked way before now - 2 weeks after the fact.

Thank you. The problem is not so much the outage as it is the way they handled it! Or, more correctly, didn't handle it. You said it much more eloquently than I did.

Re:We're SORRY?

[Cramer]

If you were paying someone to host your web site, wouldn't you have at least ONE phone number to call and find out what the deal is when your site disappears? While it may be true that they sent no e-mail or other notification to the entire world, no one has said their customers were totally in the dark.

When your telephone service goes out, do you watch the evening news for three months looking for a story about it? No, you find a working phone and start bitching at the phone company.

Re:We're SORRY?

[lyonsj]

I called every phone number I could find for these people - four of them, actually. No help, because the phone numbers they provided didn't work or went to the wrong person.

Trust me, the customers were totally in the dark.

Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[SEWilco]

An example of why multiple Internet links are important. A large server should try to have links to two ISPs with DNS on at least two separate places. Then the pipe would have run slower but data would still get through.

Re:Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[Kintanon]

An example of why multiple Internet links are important. A large server should try to have links to two ISPs with DNS on at least two separate places. Then the pipe would have run slower but data would still get through.


How many people would have been willing to pay double the cost to support having that second ISP though?

Kintanon

Re:Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[Mad Browser]

Consider if you co-locate with someone like Exodus, Above.Net, etc... that THEY take care of the redundancy... If the co-locater decides to cut you off, your redundancy doesn't mean anything...

Re:Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice theory, for the military budget for which the 'net was designed. Now that the 'net's a commercial thing, redundancy's contrary to profit, and without regulation enforcing minimal service guarantees like the telcos are under, redundancy and high reliability you're not gonna get.

Re:Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[schnurble]

An example of why multiple Internet links are important. A large server should try to have links to two ISPs with DNS on at least two separate places. Then the pipe would have run slower but data would still get through.

If they couldn't afford to double pay the first link, how the hell were they supposed to pay for the second link?

Unfortunately, business practice will often undermine correct network engineering theory.

Re:Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

We have 3. Sprint, Cable and Wireless and UUnet

MassLinux != Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

MassLinux != Linux

Re:They and customers deserve what they got

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then I guess that there is ALOT of morons out there

Hello, Gen X (or Y or whatever)

[small_dick]

Actually, negative publicity is better than none at all.

I hate the way people roll (bend?) over when a situation like this happens.

There obligation is not to walk away, but to fix the problem and move ahead. That means getting funding, and a new ISP.

I have to admit I'm curious about who ended up depositing those checks -- it almost sounds like they were deposited by an unscrupulous employee at the ISP. But the ISP's management would be foolish to go to court...so it all sounds odd.

Well, if you can't handle the struggle, you should go do something else. I don't like the way they are letting a "Linux" site get fucked up without trying to fix it.

That's what Linux means -- you have a problem, you fix it, you come back stronger. The MassLinux behavior doesn't really represent Linux behavior very well.

Re:Hello, Gen X (or Y or whatever)

[tlauder]

trust me, we would love to come back, we tried to get funding from everywhere we could think of, and my pockets ain't that deep :/ If anyone has any ideas on funding or colo's let me know.....

Re:Hello, Gen X (or Y or whatever)

[UncleRoger]

If anyone has any ideas on funding or colo's let me know.....

You could always appeal to slashdot readers for donations... again...

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Re:Hello, Gen X (or Y or whatever)

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's measured across then that would indeed be something...

something seems really bizarre

[datarealm]

• "The Internet service provider didn't give us any warning before they shut us off."

Does anyone have any information on who they were using for upstream? I could not conceive of any reputable provider simply pulling the plug without warning. Especially if there were known billing billing problems...

The other thing that I really don't get:

• "Basically, what has happened is that they were deposited into an account that didn't belong to our Internet service provider"

There's only 2 things I can think of here:

1. Fraud. In which case it should be very easy to determine from whomever signed the checks, where they were going, and how they were able to get ahold of the checks in the first place.

2. A screwup on the part of the bank, where deposited monies were going to the wrong account. However, as they were getting deposited, the ISP would never have record of checks bouncing, and I'm assuming that before filling out deposit slips that they recording receiving payments from masslinux in their billing system. In which case this could have gone on for a crazy amount of time without them ever knowing.

Something is weird about this whole situation. And assuming that everything MassLinux reported to LinuxToday is accurate, there is one seriously shady ISP out there. -- Andrew Auderieth President Datarealm Internet Services

Re:something seems really bizarre

[hey!]

A bank screw up is not possible in this case. The ISP's A/R clerk should have recorded the receipt of the check, and the deposit of the check should have been recorded by their financial system as part of the overall bank deposit.

Mystery ISP Revealed?

[Spud Zeppelin]

If you do an ARIN whois on one of MassLinux's nameservers (NS.SUNDOWNIS.COM -- Sundown IS is one of their sister companies -- 63.66.103.5) you'll find it in a particular company's CIDR block....

Let's just say it appears their problems begin and end with U. :)





This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

Re:Mystery ISP Revealed?

[buffy]

SOB! Doing CIDR lookups on BOTH of their DNS servers shows the same provider. I've worked with them for quite sometime, but funny enough...just earlier this week the same ISP cut both of my T3 lines in each office. Sadly, the billing error was on my company's side, so I didn't get to raise the dead over there.

The only reason I comment at all is that when they took our lines down, we recieved no notification either. So, this does sound like SOP for them.

I'm still dumbfounded by their potential role in this fiasco. They've been one of the sharpest ISP/backbone providers I've ever worked with, but their accounting and administration (not systems) departments seem to be running a fairly loose ship.

I was not a Masslinux customer, but if they do restart, I'd probably become one, just because I hate to see a nice little company go down in such a horrible way. Now, I don't quite buy the "didn't have connectivity, so couldn't send mail..." bit, but if he was their sysadm AND billing guy...I think I can understand. Why the hell would you put a sysadm in charge of billing?

I can see it now..."What??!?! This invoice says that hosting cost us $1MUS!"

Heh...

-Buffy

Re:Mystery ISP Revealed?

[Stormin]

This seems to be common in the ISP business. At my last company we had a credit one month because we had extended our contract for a full year.

Since we had a credit, no balance was due.

Since no balance was due, no payement was sent.

Since no payment was sent, no payement was received.

Since on payment was received, the ISP promptly killed the T1 with no warning.

Re:Mystery ISP Revealed?

[jasonaward]

So I'm not the only one who has had this experience? That at least makes me feel a little better.

One of the ISPs that I have recently done business with cannot, for the life of them, get and keep their billing straight.

We have two services with them -- a dial up account and a business web host. They not only send the bills separately, but at different times each month.

Not only that, but it they never "receive" the payments but always cash the checks. At one point this had happened for three months before contacting us. We then proceeded to explain that the checks had been cashed. It took them some digging, but they found that they were posting the checks to an inactive account! How ridiculous.

Even though it is a small company, there seems to be a giant disconnect between billing/customer service and the technical end. It amazes me to no end.

In my opinion, I have seen a number of companies die from mistakes, but come back stronger than ever. If the funds can be found to open again, this doesn't mean that they (Masslinux) could find no customers. Instead, they would probably just have to find "new" customers. Adjust the business model and provide great customer service, and they could gain many loyal customers.

Anyone know their ISP's name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know what ISP these guys were using? It seems pretty strange that a company would cut service for a high profile client so quickly. You'd think they would of worked something out. Sounds a little strange.

Re:Anyone know their ISP's name?

[Anonymous Coward]

@work.. They had 1 stinking DS1 to @work.. thats just asking for trouble.. When I found that out I decided against hosting my domain there.. Todd and Masslinux should have colo'd their equipment until they could afford atleast 2 ds1's for redundancy...

Give 'em a break!

[Wubby]

I look at it this way:

Site hosting based on linux gets screwed by corp.
and doesn't have the extra cash to pony up. Would
you have the extra cash if you charged what they did?

Taken at face value it looks like little guy get
taken for a ride and robbed blind to boot! I was
paying $10 a month. I could have paid $100 and
gotten similar service but M$ based.

Shame on we linux types for given them hard time!
I was pissed off, too, but lets not be assholes.

If they can get back up and running, they still have
at LEAST one customer.

Re:Give 'em a break!

[lyonsj]

OK, so we should feel sorry for masslinux, because the ISP took their money (or someone did) and shut off their service anyway, and then they didn't have money to pay the ISP again.

What about all the people hosting websites through masslinux, who took our money, and shut off service (involuntarily) with no notice or explanation after the fact (voluntary), and the people with the websites don't have enough money to pay another ISP.

If you're going to say shame on people for criticizing masslinux, then shame on masslinux for doing, essentially, the same thing their ISP did.

Re:Give 'em a break!

[datarealm]

Would you have the extra cash if you charged what they did?

Probably not. Which is pretty poor business planning. We do have accounts that are $10/month for non-profit organizations. Makes us feel good to give a pricecut to organizations that want to get their word out but don't necessarily have the funds to do so. (It used to be free, but the abuse of that was through the roof.) If all of our customers paid that, we'd be out of business by the end of the year (our ISP bill is coming in shortly, to be followed by payroll). There are definate costs associated to running an internet service. Fees have to be apprioprate to cover those costs.

I was paying $10 a month. I could have paid $100 and gotten similar service but M$ based.

The gamut of what you can pay is enormous. You can pay us (shameless plug, sorry) $14.95 for a commercial account in a 100% linux environment. You can go to webhostlist.com or any of about 30 other hosting directories, listings, etc and find at least 1000 companies offering reasonable levels of service on unix machines for about $25/month.

Like I was saying in my other post, and many many people have said in this thread, something is not right with what happened. And I give masslinux no brownie points for offering cheap accounts on linux boxes. We do the same, as do literally hundreds of other companies. Yet somehow we've developed models to make it work.

--
Andrew Auderieth
President
Datarealm Internet Services

Re:Give 'em a break!

[Skapare]

Andrew, one of your upstreams is netaxs.net. What's the other one (just in case netaxs.net has a fit and cuts you off for technical or business reasons)?

Saying "somehow we've developed models to make it work" doesn't give me great confidence. Sure, you're still online while MassLinux is belly up. Do you not know what you successful model is, or just don't want to say?

One lesson to learn here is that if you are seeking services from an ISP that are critical for your business operation, you want to be certain that ISP can continue to deliver. There are technical, financial, and even human resource issues to consider. So why not give us some confidence and explain how your service really stands out form the likes of MassLinux? How many upstreams do you have? How many core routers and switches do you have? Are you running HSRP? How many distinct paths from server to Internet are there?

Re:Give 'em a break!

[datarealm]

Sure - we always share our technical details with our users:

We have an OC-12 coming directly into our server room. This is a sonet ring -- bidrectional. If one ring fails, all traffic will run the other direction.

Off of that we run 2 T3's. One is a point-to-point T3 into the netaxs NOC provided by MFS. The other goes into Bell Atlantic's SMDS cloud which routes us straight into pennsauken (the second largest NAP on the east coast).

Most of our traffic goes straight through pennsauken. netaxs has direct T3's straight down to MAE-East, so any traffic headed that way will go through their NOC. If their NOC blows up, 100% of our traffic will route through pennsauken. Our router speaks BGP, and we have a hot spare available.

If there is some sort of critical failure in our data center, we have written contracts to relocate our servers into their NOC (about 3 blocks away) until we can get ours back in order.

In the 4+ years we've been serving web sites, that has worked out very well for us.

--
Andrew Auderieth
Datarealm Internet Services

The outage isn't the problem

[UncleRoger]

Todd Lauder seems like a nice guy (that's what I thought, anyway, before all this happened.) So let's say that what he says is what happened.

Okay, stuff happens.

The problem is that no one bothered to contact the customers.

They had access to the computers, so they had access to e-mail addresses. They could have checked whois (or their own records) for phone numbers. They could have sent out snail-mail letters, if necessary. What's the cost of a few stamps compared to going out of business?

The big problem I faced was that I didn't know what happened. For the first few days, I had to sit there and wonder if I should move my domain or not.

Had I received an e-mail, a phone call, a letter, or even spotted a message in a newsgroup (I searched!) explaining what was up, I probably would have gotten someone to host a temporary page saying "technical difficulties" or something, gotten my domain pointed at it, and waited it out.

In fact, I got a couple of offers (based on my posts here and in newsgroups) to host my entire site for free, and in reality, I could have set something up at home on my DSL connection.

But I didn't know.

So, I assumed the worst and set up my sites with a new ISP. With no news, no contact, I had to assume they had taken the money and run.

Meanwhile, with the outage going on, day by day by day, more and more of my users were slipping away from me. I don't know if I will bother continuing, because of the same reasons MassLinux offered.

Luckily for me, this is not what pays my mortgage, so I will survive. I feel for those for whom this is not the case.

As to lawsuits, yeah, I was definitely planning something to at least get back what I had paid them, possibly something more for all the time I had to devote to setting up and reconfiguring my sites elsewhere. (I've still got a couple that aren't set up quite right yet.)

Re:The outage isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

1) the first couple of days were likely spent trying to track down what went wrong, with a lot of time spent on the phone on hold.

2) they hosted 800 domains, which translates into a long, long time to try and contact them all.

3) just because a former employee now has internet access doesn't mean they did at the time of the problem.

Re:The outage isn't the problem

[SEAL]

There's no excuse. If you can administer 800 domains, you can certainly sit down and snail mail those 800 points of contact. I could do it in a single day if I made it my number one priority. Obviously MassLinux didn't. SEAL

Re:They and customers deserve what they got

[Anonymous Coward]

There are even morons out there that don't know /A LOT/ is TWO WORDS!

Re:...uhm because redundancy costs money maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's do some math:

800 customers * $10 per customer = $8000/month

T1 line in Massachusettes = $2000/month

Leased office space =~ $3000 to $4000/month

Employee salaries...

Electric bills...

Lawyer fees...

...so you want another T1 line? Please don't try
to start your own business. Keep your day job.

Masslinux

[tlauder]

I see alot of people asking why they didn't get emails from us explaining the outage, the short answer, we didn't have connectivity, I only rescently got a cable modem installed, and that was after all the articles.

Re:Masslinux

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you admin a web-hosting company and when their link goes down you honestly couldn't figure out any way to email the customers? How hard is it to find a cheapo modem and set up a quickie ISP account? That explanation just doesn't fly.

Re:Masslinux

[Mad Browser]

I have a hard time with this...

If it was my business I would:

1. Drive to wherever the box was and grab the email addresses.

2. Get a $20/month dialup account and start sending out my emails...

Waiting for a cable modem install is not, IMHO, a good explanation...

Re:Masslinux

[mindstrm]

I'm sorry, but this doesn't hold up.
This is the modern world.
There are TONS of dialup ISP's you could have called to send email out.

Re:Masslinux

[UncleRoger]

I see alot of people asking why they didn't get emails from us explaining the outage, the short answer, we didn't have connectivity

Come on, you're telling me that not one person at an entire ISP didn't have a separate dial-up account? That no one had an old account at a university? That you had no friends with dial-up accounts? That you local libraries, universities, government, etc. have no public access whatsoever? Or was it that Hotmail, altavista, yahoo, etc. suddenly quit offerring free e-mail?

Are you saying no one there had any free AOL CD's laying around?

And your telephone service got cut at the same time? and the post office suddenly ran completely out of stamps?

Oh, wait, I remember, you ran MassLinux from a deserted island, and the Professor was too busy building Mr. Howell a new golf cart to make you a transmitter, right?

Sucks to be so out of touch, doesn't it?

Re:Masslinux

[Ralph Wiggam]

I have no doubt that you and your company completely got the shaft on this. You were blindsided by forces beyond your control and it doesn't get much worse than that. I just have a hard time believing that there wasn't *anything* you could do to get onto the net somewhere, somehow and let people know what the situation was.
Two weeks ago, the company I work for moved offices and the new office didn't have the T1 hooked up like we were promised. So we dug a bunch of 14.4 modems out of a box, stuck them in our workstations, ran ugly exposed wires across the office to get to analog phone jacks, and used our personal dial-up ISPs to get online. We sent emails to people who were counting on us and let them know that things were screwed up, and that we were working our hardest to make them right. Admittedly, you got screwed over quite a bit harder than we did, but come on, I know you're smart guys. Those gold AOL CDs get 100 free hours and you can pick one up with any computer magazine at any 24 hour newsstand. If it wasn't for adversity, life would be pretty easy.

-Barry

Re:MassLinux

[Skapare]

You pay for what you get. Sure, a hosting company with redundant pipes is a better provider. But they cost more, too. I never looked at their service offering but I get the impression it was cheap cheap cheap. Did MassLinux ever say they had redundant links to the Internet?

Re:Masslinux

[AdamT]

"How hard is it to find a cheapo modem and set up a quickie ISP account? That explanation just doesn't fly."
And when randomuser@some.random.isp emails you claiming to be your webadmin you're going to beleive them? If the answers yes I have a bridge you might be intrested in...

Re:...uhm because redundancy costs money maybe?

[mattc]

No one said to have another T1 line. Just get an additional (slower) connection, for emergency backup only.

Why didn't u just move the box to a dif isp?

[notbob]

Why didn't you just colocate the box or boxes on a different isp with like a 3 month contract while you settled up shit with the old isp? Wouldn't that have been smarter then watching the whole company go down in flames?

Re:Why didn't u just move the box to a dif isp?

[tlauder]

we would have, except for the lack of cash :(

Re:Why didn't u just move the box to a dif isp?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe if you charge 24.95 that would provide more cash flow. I'm sure most of your 800 customers can afford to pay that. You're not really doing them a favor charging 10$ then end up chapter 11 in any case, sounds like you learned a lesson or two from this.. so good luck to your next venture.. always be up front with the customer and watch "Its a wonderful life" again..hehe

Who was the ISP

[Kelt]

Can anyone tell us who the Provider was?

-Steve

Re:Who was the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it is Harvard.net

MassLinux Killed MassLinux

[Goody]

A billing problem and circuit disconnection shouldn't take down a whole business. In a business you have to do whatever it takes. If they would have scrambled and communicated with customers anyway they could, they probably would have retained 90 % of their clients, IMHO. The billing issue would have been resolved eventually.

This is a case of Darwin's Law at work in business. If this wouldn't have happened, something else would have taken it down eventually. Someone gave up too soon.

Real reason for closing is sad

[Paolo]

I'm sure that everyone caught the dissapointment that Todd felt from the community. People got on his back too much, something which I don't believe he expected. If he had wanted to continue, he could have reopened in a relatively small amount of time--say 2 weeks--had the dedication from the community been there.

How is that possible? Donated bandwidth, users sending in next month's fees ahead of time, class action lawsuit--any of these things could have helped. However, evidently users were pissed off and left Todd to stand as a one man mountain to bear the brunt of the sorting out and accusations.

C'mon guys, it's the holidays and we can't even give a little.

Re:Real reason for closing is sad

[Kintanon]

I have to very much agree with this. The company spends a lot of time, effort, and money to host people for next to nothing and as soon as they have a problem they are inundated by hate mail and flames. Where is the community support? I've been on MUDs where the Imms ran out of funds to keep the mud up and the players started sending in cash. The MUD ran for 3 years off of 2 months of people donating cash. Why isn't there that kind of community here? Where is your support for the people who help you out?
Everyone has been shouting that they should have gotten a dialup account to send out e-mails, they should have done this or that or the other to contact their customers. But in the middle of trying to figure out what the hell was going on that just might not have been possible, from what I know this is NOT a large company. They don't neccesarily have the resources to contact 800 people. Now they should have had a contingency plan, but heck I work for one of the largest check printing companies in the world and our contingency plans usually cons0ist of 'Call the Tech and watch the shit hit the fan'. Which means I get a lot of phone calls....
What I'm trying to say is BACK OFF. These people did a lot for the community and when they stumbled the Community grabbed a 2x4 and beat them to the ground.

Kintanon

Re:Real reason for closing is sad

[UncleRoger]

I'm sure that everyone caught the dissapointment that Todd felt from the community. People got on his back too much, something which I don't believe he expected.

Todd is not the only one. A big part of the reason I went with MassLinux was their use and support of Linux and OSS. At the time, I was a strong supporter of Linux as a Windows replacement.

Now, however, I am sitting here with a new $3500 laptop that I'm not even sure I'm going to bother loading Linux on, even though my original intent was for it to be a Linux-only machine.

How is that possible? Donated bandwidth, users sending in next month's fees ahead of time, class action lawsuit--any of these things could have helped.

To be honest, had I known the situation, say, two weeks ago, I would have gladly sent in some money to keep them going. All for Linux and Linux for all, or some pseudo-religious nonsense like that.

However, evidently users were pissed off and left Todd to stand as a one man mountain to bear the brunt of the sorting out and accusations.

That's not quite accurate. MassLinux left the users high and dry. We had no way to get in touch with Todd or anyone else at MassLinux. Todd didn't return phone calls, and for some reason I didn't call his home number (which I had, actually) in the middle of the night.

I still don't know who is involved other than Todd. Chris Gann seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Sam McClellan claims he has no relationship to MassLinux other than as a customer, even though he bought the company (according to legal documents presented to others.) The phone number listed in whois belongs to a company someone from MassLinux used to work at a year ago.

Accusations are all we had, since we had no facts whatsoever. All I knew was that I didn't exist, internet-wise.

We didn't leave Todd anywhere -- we didn't have him. We had no valid contact info. We had no info whatsoever. By the time I got ahold of his home number, I was already moving my sites.

Sure, I feel bad for Todd. I feel bad about the blight on Linux that MassLinux caused. I would like to know who is to blame -- not so much for the outage, but for the lack of contact and info.

What they should have done is on the day they were cut off, go to the local library, a friend's house, whereever, and set up a hotmail account, a web page at geocities, and posted a message(s) to appropriate newsgroups. They should have fired off a message to slashdot, linux today, etc. Then I would have gotten a list of all of the accounts they hosted and sat down to call them. Each and everyone.

But I run a real, service-oriented business. Not a mickey-mouse ISP using a toy operating system, which is the impression they have created.

C'mon guys, it's the holidays and we can't even give a little.

Sorry, I already gave, and I'm too busy getting my web sites set up again to worry about the holidays.

Re:Real reason for closing is sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Todd is not the only one. A big part of the reason I went with MassLinux was their use and support of Linux and OSS. At the time, I was a strong supporter of Linux as a Windows replacement.

Now, however, I am sitting here with a new $3500 laptop that I'm not even sure I'm going to bother loading Linux on, even though my original intent was for it to be a Linux-only machine.

I hope you're not making that decision on the basis of this fiasco. MassLinux may have acted irresponsibly in handling the situation, but from what we can tell so far, the failure had nothing to do with Linux itself. It was an organizational problem, nothing more.

Sure, I feel bad for Todd. I feel bad about the blight on Linux that MassLinux caused. I would like to know who is to blame -- not so much for the outage, but for the lack of contact and info.

On the other hand, you have a point... that even though Linux itself isn't to blame for the fiasco, people will be left with the impression that it was. And that's very unfortunate.

Re:Real reason for closing is sad

[UncleRoger]

On the other hand, you have a point... that even though Linux itself isn't to blame for the fiasco, people will be left with the impression that it was. And that's very unfortunate.

At some point, the Microsoft-dependant media will get a hold of this and use it to counter claims that Windows is unreliable. They'll point to MassLinux with headlines like "Linux-based ISP goes down, leaving 800 web sites out of touch".

Meanwhile, I have this bad taste in my mouth. Forget about the fact that my gateway server is dutifully providing connectivity for the whole house (9 computers) by running SuSE on a 486/50 with 8MB/340MB. I know, intellectually, that Linux is superior to Windows, but...

It's like the guy who talked his boss into going with MassLinux -- right before they disappeared. Sure his getting fired is awful, but on a bigger scale, his (former) boss/company is one more that will never use Linux.

Like many other minority groups, sometimes Linux users have to think about the possible consequences of their actions. No one remembers all the people of a certain arbitrary classification who don't cut you off on the freeway, or don't mug you, or aren't drunkards, but one bad driver, one mugging, one bender, and all the old stereotypes get a new lease on life.

I haven't given up on Linux yet. My new ISP is Linux based. Of the 5 computers connected to my keyboard/monitor, 1 runs MS-DOS, 1 runs MS-DOS/Win3.11, 2 run Linux, and one has Win98 and an empty 10GB hard drive that might get Linux loaded on it.

ISP..

[John Fulmer]

In doing a minimal amount of research, I note that the only ISP listed through the trail of domain regs is BigPlanet, out of Provo, UT (according to to the reg for bigplanet.com.

I believe that they may be the culprit, since the tech and admin contact is sammcc@BESTGUIDES.COM which -> sammcc@BIGPLANET.COM in the reg for bestguides.com.

However, I'm appalled by the flak that has been thrown around because of this. The only crime here is that MassLinux didn't have a large amount of cash reserves, and that a STUPID decision from their feeder ISP (because of possible theft?) could destroy their business. Maybe they were too naive...

jf

Re:ISP..

[tlauder]

Ok, just so bigplanet.com or sammcc@bigplanet.com doesn't come hounding us, that was not our ISP

Thanks
Todd

Re:ISP..

[John Fulmer]

Darn...So much for the Sherlock Holmes.... :)

Anyone have an IP address for the origional www.masslinux.com?

jf

Re:ISP..

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you at least tell us if we're getting warmer?

Re:ISP..

[malice95]

No.. the ip block that they had is owned by harvard.net which is most likely their isp.

This stuff does happen every day.

[Rob the Roadie]

Right. Enough of this messing about from people saying they should have sent more cheques or they should have traced cheques or paid in cash of whatever.

I had an account with Demon Internet (UK) which was cut off without notice after a Direct Debit system screwed up and didn't take any money from my account. I had been a customer of Demon for about three years and was in the middle of my fourth year when one day I could no longer get out of my network! As Demons accounting software had screwed up and not taken any money for my quarterly subsciption for my leased line I was disconnected.

It took almost two weeks to get everything back up and working again and this was only resolved by delivering a bankers draft for a full years charges to their offices in London.

This shit happens each and every day. You can not seriously tell me that cheques never get lost in the post or misplaced on desks. You can not expect me to believe that people within large corporations are all trustworthy and honest. And you can not tell me that fraud doesn't happen!

I was not a customer of MassLinux but I understand what they are going through and I offer any support that I can give them.

Somethings in life are never easy. Doing something like ground breaking is one of them. MassLinux must have been one of the first people offering hosting services on Linux. Look at the banners on /. and see how many people are doing it now.

They will have lost the respect and faith that a lot of their customers had placed in them but that is sometimes just how these things work out.

There are lessons that can be learn't here, let's hope that everyone can see them and ensures that the big guy doesn't fuck over the little guy in the future.

Re:This stuff does happen every day.

[stump]

This kind of stuff does happen everyday. It's this very reason that MassLinux AND their customers should have known better. MassLinux hosting 800+ domains with no redundant internet feed?! That's not a mixup, that's lack of planning.

A little research...

[elixir]

Try:

$ whois masslinux.com@whois.networksolutions.com
$ whois 209.219.204.3@whois.arin.net

And the ISP shows up. Who would have thought!

Re:A little research...

[Spud Zeppelin]

But isn't the address in the 209 space for the Cable Modem-based connection they've switched to NOW so people can get their files and fix DNS? I was looking for an address for one of their boxes that isn't accessible :)




This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

Re:A little research...

[elixir]

If you read the whois output:

Record last updated on 10-Jan-1999.

So this would have been the original server IP.
And I can't ping that IP either.

Re:A little research...

[Skapare]

The record to check is the HOST record. You can change the IP on a HOST record and it won't show up as a change on the DOMAIN record because the DOMAIN record wasn't changed. The wonders of a relational database. You have to check them all since a change can be made either way.

However, the HOST record for their DNS servers does show fairly old data. NS.NEBULA.ORG was last changed on 19-Mar-1999 and NS.SUNDOWNIS.COM was last changed on 02-Jun-1999.

It kinda looks like they might have been running this from a cable modem? NS.NEBULA.ORG (209.219.204.3) goes into home.com and loops in some private address space somewhere. NS.SUNDOWNIS.COM (63.66.103.5) gets out through C&W (so there are BGP announcements for the space) to ALTER.NET in SF and stops, so some other routing issue is present there.

Poor customers...

[stump]

Sometimes you forget that not everything is free. ISPs and web hosting services are not commodity items. You really do get what you pay for. As important as the technical aspects of an ISP are, the administration is what makes an ISP stand out. MassLinux certainly stands out now, hopefully as a lesson of what not to do.

I can't believe some of the posts from the last Slashdot article. It seems people were running real revenue generating businesses on MassLinux. If true, this is stupid in the extreme.

Hosting a business at an ISP with no redundant network feed? At an ISP without the financial stability to make it through a check-cashing mixup? Having your domain name and DNS contact information hosted on this same site? And you didn't wonder why this service was so cheap?

If you lost your data and or livelihood because of this mess, that's what you deserve. Now get back out there and try again.

Re:Poor customers...

[UncleRoger]

He's entirely right.

You really do get what you pay for.

Anyone who would base their business on free software has got to be entirely insane.

If you want to run a real business you need to make sure you're hosting with a company that has paid real money for their operating system. None of this toy software written by a bunch of amateur hackers.

Re:Poor customers...

[poink]

I think stump was referring to the fact that MassLinux a single DS1, and not the fact they ran Linux.

Re:Poor customers...

[stump]

I'll assume your post was at least partially sarcastic, since my original post was.

As far as any of us can tell, the OS had nothing to do with the failures of MassLinux. I use a variety of free software, including Linux and *BSDs, and wouldn't trade them for anything. I trust 150+ sites that I'm currently hosting with free software.

I should have been more specific in my rant. I was pointing out that paying effectively nothing for webhosting should have raised some flags. Bandwidth costs money. No way around that, and you DO get what you pay for.

My apologies if you've lost money in this mess.

Re:Poor customers...

[iCEBaLM]

Anyone who would base their business on free software has got to be entirely insane.

Apache runs the majority of the web, Apache is free, Apache is stable.

IIS runs about 35% of the web, throwing a bunch of A's on port 80 crashes IIS, IIS costs a lot of money.

A programs price tag is no guage for its effectiveness. Never forget that.

-- iCEBaLM

Re:Poor customers...

[UncleRoger]

I'll assume your post was at least partially sarcastic, since my original post was.

Actually, entirely sarcastic. 8^) (It's too bad you're the only one who realized that; the other posters missed the point completely and immediately rode into battle to defend their sacred software.)

I trust 150+ sites that I'm currently hosting with free software.

I should have been more specific in my rant. I was pointing out that paying effectively nothing for webhosting should have raised some flags. Bandwidth costs money. No way around that, and you DO get what you pay for.

And programmer time costs money -- I know, because I charge an arm and a leg for mine. My point was that just as Free Software doesn't necessarily mean Bad Software, neither does Free Hosting mean Bad Hosting.

(and just for the record, I was paying $20/month, which, while certainly inexpensive, is not "effectively nothing".)

It is possible to run an ISP for next to nothing, charge next to nothing, and still make a profit while providing good service. MassLinux was blazingly fast, technologically aware, and (at least originally) well-intentioned.

(What they weren't, I think, is street smart -- that is, they didn't really have any clue how to run a real business in the Real World.)

As far as any of us can tell, the OS had nothing to do with the failures of MassLinux.

Neither did (according to the Official Story) their financial situation. They made payments in good faith, their ISP fouled up, and voila -- a Bad Situation.

What turned a simple Bad Situation into a Disaster was the way they handled it (or didn't handle it, actually.)

I had recently sent them a check for $200. I figure I'm out about $150 worth of hosting. Add to that a couple day's work (say, ~$1000) plus some unknown amount of lost business. Really, a pittance.

Lost faith in the company due to the lack of communication: priceless.

Look at it this way: if you had an employee who called up and said "My car engine died. I'm going to put in a new one, so I won't be in today" you might be upset, you might even dock him a day's pay, but that's it. If he called up later that afternoon and said "this is taking longer than I thought, I may be out a few days," you would probably reschedule some meetings, maybe hire a temp, etc. Still, no big deal -- you can deal with it.

If instead, he simply didn't show up, you didn't know what had happened, and when you tried to call, you got no answer, you'd be a little more upset (and, hopefully, a little worried.) If this went on for several days with no word, and then he finally showed up and said "oh, my engine died, I had to put in a new one," it would be a different story. If you said "why didn't you call, or rent a car or something," and he just shrugged and said "I didn't think of it", you would probably fire him.

Most companies require you to plan your vacations in advance, so they can schedule other people to fill in for you. If you suddenly won a cruise leaving the next day, they still probably would let you go. But if you just didn't show up and didn't call, you would be fired.

Well, MassLinux is fired.

Re:Poor customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

touche!
Didn't these guys realise that they were so important for their customers?
since they hosted so many important sites, they could have been easily bailed out of this small cheque misplacement mishap, had they contacted their customers.
The point is that they didn't handle the failure correctly, and they deserve to die for this.
A simple PR messup can bring a whole company to ruins... a lesson to be learnt!

MassLinux (also posted to LinuxToday Discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that isn't the whole story. When you pay a hosting service to provide this type of service, you are paying for more than just the pipeline.

The first thing a hosting provider who wants to call himself a professional needs to do is have a contingency plan for the failure of his leased line or any other component, for that matter. After all, backhoe fade or any of a dozen other problems could have caused that leased line to become unavailable. That MassLinux were unprepared to deal with that contingency shows that they weren't doing their job *long* before the billing dispute arose.

The second thing a hosting provider has to do is be professional in his communications with his customers. So the line went down. So he won't be able to restore it. Fine. I shouldn't be learning this from a story in LinuxToday. I'm a customer, fer christs sake. I've paid you money. If you can't live up to your commitment, that's fine, but you have to let me know -- don't you think I'm losing money too from this outage? From the time of the outage, Todd/MassLinux were completely unreachable by any means, including the customer service contacts they had provided. This is completely unacceptable, and completely unprofessional. [Name withheld as past dealings with MassLinux suggest that providing my name would endanger our efforts to recover the money we had payed to MassLinux for service which we will now not receive]

Mail Fraud

[Mazzella!]

Basically, what has happened is that they [the isp's checks] were deposited into an account that didn't belong to our Internet service provider, and our lawyer is currently working that out.
The False Representation Statute (Title 39, United States Code, Section 3005). This is mail fraud if they were mailed to the ISP. Contact the postmaster immediately! Contact the Police and FBI. If the checks were mailed, and cashed by persons that were not destined to, that is a federal crime. See this page from the USPS explaining mail fraud.

Mail Fraud

[Mazzella!]

Basically, what has happened is that they [the isp's checks] were deposited into an account that didn't belong to our Internet service provider, and our lawyer is currently working that out.
This is mail fraud if they were mailed to the ISP. Contact the postmaster immediately! Contact the Police and FBI. If the checks were mailed, and cashed by persons that were not destined to, that is a federal crime. See this page from the USPS explaining mail fraud.

It's a shame

[348]

The MassLinux team may be able to recoup some of its financial losses in court, but their reputation as a reliable webhosting company is beyond repair.

Ya think! Jeez it is a shame that the open environments get "damaged" like this. Although they did make many critical PR mistakes, the overall concept was/is good, and garage operations will think twice before an undertaking like this again.

If I were them

[Bryan Andersen]

If I were them I'd pick up the pieces and continue from where I left off. I would go on. This is only a minor setback. If you need cash, call in a few loans from friends and relatives, etc.

Half-baked criticism

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, let's put the shoe on the other foot.

Let's say you make a payment on your phone bill, and then get a past due notice. You know that your check has been cashed, so you ignore the notice (this might not be the *prudent* thing to do, but since these notices usually have jargon on them to the effect "if you have already mailed your payment, please disregard this notice", who can be blamed for ignoring them when they know they've paid the bill *and* the checks have been cashed????).

So you ignore the notices because you know you've paid and the checks have cleared and the notices say disregard if you've paid...

and then your phone gets disconnected.

This is hardly an unbelievable scenario. I'm not saying that this is what happened -- the facts are not all in -- but there is nothing unbelievable about this situation at all.

Lighten up. Sometimes bad things happen to people for no good reason. That's certainly still possible in this case.

Re:Half-baked criticism

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe I'd ignore the first notice. But on the second check and the second notice I'd pay attention. And if they threatened to terminate service I'd be on the phone within a minute. And if my business depended on maintaining service, I would investigate at the earliest hint of trouble. I agree that not all the facts are in, and I agree that some people are not as prudent as I. But It still sounds like a total lie to me. I realize that nobody here can produce the cancelled checks. But if somebody does come up with those checks, I'll bet dollars to donuts that they say "NSF" on the back. (And I ain't talking about the national science foundation)

It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[dave_aiello]

I don't know what really happened here, but, it is a serious miscalculation on the part of the people from MassLinux to try to head off customer complaints this way. They are only hurting themselves by going out on to places like LinuxToday and Slashdot, and telling such an unbelievable story.

I am not a Masslinux customer, but if I were, this is what I would do:

1) If I were a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I would contact the Department of Telecommunication and Energy. Calling them on the phone at (800) 392-6066, their complaint line, is probably the best approach. My question would be whether they are the correct place to launch an investigation at the state level.

2) I would call my (Massachusetts) assemblyman and ask for assistance. This will probably require a letter sent by US Mail documenting the loss of service and the lack of business-to-customer communication.

3) Regardless of where I lived and worked, I would contact the Federal Communications Commission and ask which federal agency ought to be involved in an investigation. I would go to the Federal Government because they have some jurisdiction over anyone participating in interstate commerce.

No one should accept heresay and innuendo. These people represented themselves as a business and they took payment from customers for services. Masslinux customers have a right to a complete and thorough explanation, including a determination of ultimate responsibility for the disruption.

Anyone who accepts less because there is no recourse in the "New Ecomomy" doesn't understand their rights as American citizens.

I wish I didn't feel this way, but part of me thinks that the community should stop meaningless political actions like boycotting Amazon.com and start using its passion and determination to get to the bottom of this incredible situation.
--

Dave Aiello

Re:It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[Kintanon]

A sincere FUCK OFF to you. MassLinux is refunding the money that they have recieved from customers for which they will not be able to render service. They got shafted by their provider and did the best they could to fix it. These people were doing a service to the community and making very very little money from it. So stop bitching.

Kintanon

Re:It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[dave_aiello]

No need to get personal with me. It's to Masslinux's credit if they are able to refund their customers' money. But, there should still be a full accounting of the situation.

If Masslinux truly got shafted by their provider, then there provider should be made to answer for the inconvenience it has caused Masslinux's customers.
--

Dave Aiello

Re:It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[Kintanon]

Did you READ the story? They paid, 3 checks they sent were cashed, the ISP asked for the 3 checks, then said they would look into the mistake, then cut them off without warning. Masslinux then did what they could to get back online, they could have done a better job of it but everyone is getting their page and data back, everyone is getting their money back, and Masslinux is GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. What the FUCK more do you want from them? They are BROKE, and you want to take them to court or have them investigated over something they couldn't control?!

Kintanon

Re:It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[stump]

I think dave_aiello was making a point in that MassLinux _may_ have been negligent. He's gone to the trouble of locating some resources that could be helpful for people seeking an investigation.

If I had been a customer, I'd want more than just a shrug and quick excuse from the sysadmin.

Re:It's Time to Call in the State & Federal Gov't

[dave_aiello]

I certainly did mean that MassLinux may have been negligent. But, another possible explanation is that the provider that reportedly cut MassLinux off has an internal security problem. Or, one of the banks involved in paying the checks did not proof the person who presented the checks for payment.

Why should MassLinux be bankrupted if they acted responsibly? Don't the employees and officers of that company deserve to have their names cleared, if they did nothing wrong?

In any event, how would anyone involved in the process ever know the truth? If MassLinux were to sue its provider in a civil case, it would probably be settled with an agreement to not disclose any of the details of the case or the settlement.

In that case, all MassLinux's customers would ever know is that somebody probably did something wrong. What I'm saying is that all of the parties involved, including this community, don't have to accept that.
--

Dave Aiello

Appluade

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to take this time to Applaud Todd Lauder for his many responces to questione here on /.

Didn't work

[BenH]

I just tried and all I got is:

No match for "MASSLINUX.COM@WHOIS.NETWORKSOLUTIONS.COM".

And

No match for "209.219.204.3@WHOIS.ARIN.NET".

But this may be my broken setup...

Re:Didn't work

[elixir]

Visit http://www.arin.net/whois/ and enter the IP...

Re:Didn't work

[hollow_man]

Or alternatively you might have a decent whois binary and have to use whois -h whois.arin.net , rather than Linux's half assed approach to the whois tool... bleh
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod

Read the story please.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says that the checks were deposited by the ISP's bank into someone else's account. This has nothing to do with MassLinux's bank. It was the ISP's bank that screwed MassLinux with their boneheaded blunder (no doubt they are completely indemnified from suffering any liability over this too, even though their stupidity has resulted in the demise of MassLinux).

You have to have money to run a business. MassLinux lost three months' worth of payments. This is NOT easily overcome, I can assure you (I'm a business owner too).

The only thing that I can see that MassLinux might have done differently is that they should have informed their customers immediately -- by whatever means possible. That was a very poor decision on their part.

Moderate that post UP

[Anonymous Coward]

This man has made an excellent point.

The ISP would have deposited the checks and entered the amounts in their books, and there would have been a little flag indicating that MassLinux had made their payments.

IF it then turned out that the checks went someplace else, there would be NO indication that MassLinux had done anything wrong at all. Instead, the ISP's bank account comes up short. Now, they may have noticed that the amount of the shortfall happened to match the amount paid by MassLinux, but since they have marked already that MassLinux had paid, this should have set them to wondering: what happened to that money? We know they paid, so what happened? It would be idiocy on the part of some dorky accountant to just conclude "Well, I guess I made a mistake when I flagged MassLinux as paid in full. Our bank account is short by the amount they should have paid, so they must not have actually paid -- even though I marked it as paid." There's no way that this could happen in three consecutive billing periods by accident. No accountant worth anything at all could make such a boneheaded mistake.

Something else must be going on. MassLinux might believe this to be true -- but it can't be. They're either making it up, or they've been lied to themselves.

I did Re:Read the story please.

[platypus]

Sorry, I was a bit lax in my wording.
I únderstand that that it was not their bank, it was their providers bank (or some nice institution in between...)
But if you buy something and the money for that doesn't show up on the sellers bank account, you will be the first to face problems, whether it's your fault or not. And if your business is to resell the goods, you better make sure that the flow continues. I know small companies often cannot afford to pay twice. But look at the original interview:

We had sent in three payments to our Internet service provider, and they claimed they never got them. The checks were cashed. After going through numerous days of trying to figure out what happened, they couldn't figure it out, so we got our lawyer involved.
No word they didn't have the money for a forth check, in contrary, they seemed to have money for lawyers (not that I blame them). So I got the impression I stated in the first comment, that they could have afforded first to pay to assure ongoing service and then try to get their money back.
And just here on slashdot I saw mr. lauder stating that their ISP cut them off without warning, that didn't appear in the original article.

Internal problems too...

[Isldeur]

Hi All - just wanted to say that mass linux seemed to have some of it's own internal problems too. I was going to move there because of the great price but I was getting loads of bad vibes from the place - for example, my user had no quotas! I just seemed shoddily done. I know they're great guys, but I couldn't trust them on how nice they were.

Possible destination of Payment Check

[Anonymous Coward]

While recently performing a civic duty ( hence this is an anonymous post ) , I had occasion to review a check cashing fraud case. The checks had been sent to a large telecommunications firm's Texas offices. The checks were deposited to an account ( Sprintech ) at a Manhattan bank. Some of these were checks from other large corps I recognized. This sh*t does happen. I don't know what happened to MassLinux, but anything is possible.

Class Action Lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

I am working to get a class action lawsuit up against these jokers.

Ill let everyone know when we are ready.

MassLinux...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got one word that will solve MassLinux's problems... IPO.

Any customer of MassLinux remember their IP?

[Skapare]

Any customer of MassLinux remember their IP? If so, we can use that to really figure what netblock was being used and what the upstream ISP chain was.

Heh

[TheCarp]

Well I am only a lowly dialup guy...but I had
my acount terminated (I got it back damnit)
for something I did 2 YEARS previously!

I called the ISP to ask why I had been shut off.
They said I accessed a certain server of theirs
that customers were not allowed to access (all
have acounts on it...but we arn't allowed to
log in...it wont even allow logins). They say I
made a directory called bin and put a symlink to
ping in it so I could ping from my acount

HA! I did that 2 years previously...back when this
"Off limits" machine was the main server they
gave everyone shells on. There was no complaint
then. Now 2 years later they find what I did and
terminate the account because I suposedly
"Accessed it"

I tried to explain this to the tech support
guy (who was a cluebie himself) and he said
"Well someone must have gotten your password"
yea thats it...they got my password and logged
into a box that logins arn't even allowed on.
Nice try.

SO I reset my password and got my acount back.
The stupidity is just too much sometimes.

hrrrrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his partner stole the money went to tahiti and not todd is gona have to front the cash from his own pocket. Thats why he doesn't want to come back as masslinux. In any event I think it is very noble of him to come forward and try to address the goings on. I know if I let 800 people down facing them would be very difficult I think people should give him credit for this. I don't see any other names comming out saying they are affiliated with masslinux other than former customers. And as for their upstream provider I would like to know who they are so I don't choose them in the future.

Annother prospective

[Felinoid]

It dose seem someone was out to hurt MassLinux.. I say this becouse it appears THREE checks were stolen...
One check is a theaf who really has no idea WHO they are stealing from.. it's just annother wealthy busness they can afford to cut annother check...
Two checks... if this guy dose prepetually steal he'd go after someone else so no one would notice... It is very unlikely two checks from one busness would get stolen "at random" anyway..
So the theaf is targetting MassLinux.. ok so he's got something against them.. Two checks stolen.. MassLinux is badly injured... But now he's really put himself in the open.. at this point he should take cover.. revenge or not.. and wait for next month...
Third check... Clearly this guy is SO filled with hate or is so focused on his objective of hurting MassLinux that he dosn't think to back off.. Instead of protecting himself from a posable investigation...

After THREE checks the theaf has allready made it clear it's no mistake.... Thats not a smart move for a theaf.. better to leave your victiom to believe he's a victiom of a mistake than to believe he is a victiom of a theaf.

Cashing the checks... the theaf is eather greedy or just blinded by his objectives. Cashing the checks after making it clear the checks were stolen [by stealing three] leaves a paper trail to track him down.

What is his objectives? Who knows.. maybe an angry open source advocate or maybe someone who is opposed to open source for some reason... (Take your pick theres enough FUD out there) maybe he hates Linux sooo much... maybe he blames all there internal problems on Linux. Maybe he lives in a shack in the middle of nowhere and plays to much Doom and wears trenchcoats.
Who knows...
The end point is someone made some effort to make shure three checks from MassLinux never made it to there feed provider...

Re:Annother prospective

[windex]

I blame Microsoft, they were trying to bash linux servers, yeah, thats it. Don't forget to mention they COULD do so if they wanted to, they certianly have the cash. Ah, the world is so fun. Honestly, who knows, though. :)

Absurdity.

[bnitsua]

Not only should former MassLinux customers take legal action against anyone who involved themselves with the MassLinux server but they need tar and feather action taken against them as well. Not only that, all former customers should march down to MassLinux's headquarters and burn the building down (who cares if their data is lost, it will certainly prove the point!)

Seriously, this is obviously a bureaucratic mistake that's consequences affect a bunch of computer geeks. These are sysadmins who took the only LOGICAL way out, not public relations people.

alternative providers

[Anonymous Coward]

I know SourceForge is good for the OSS projects. But does anyone have any recommendations for a good OSS orientated commercial provider? I checked out Voxel Dot Net and they look pretty sweet. Anyone have any comments?

ROFLMFAO

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes indeed.

"...we didn't have connectivity..."

Crap, ya know, I wish I could fly the fuck through life like this. I can just see it now ...

"Um, Patrick, I'm really sorry that we couldn't Y2K test all of those hospital equipment thingies, but, um, we really got tired."

Or ---

"I feel like this is just really hard to do. I don't think I can take a crap!"

or ---

"WTF? I have to pay for this food?"

[ROFL at my self...]

You have got to be the MOST pathetic, lame excuse-maker ever! You make ME jealous. And boy, I've made some SERIOUS excuses in -my- day, but you just took the first place position.

What a fucking wolf-cookie:

"...we didn't have connectivity..."

Kinda like:

[1] We didn't have a gasoline truck following behind us to help us if we accidentally forgot that we needed, um, gasoline, and stuff, and ran out, so we didn't make it, even though we could have like, I dunno, pulled into a gas station when we were a little low.

Ah, I could go on and on and on, but I figure you get the point.

THESE ARE LAME EXCUSES. Take your lumps, admit that you ROYALLY screwed up in whatever area that you did, and move the hell on, man.

Business or KoolAide Stand

[Anonymous Coward]

Three things: 1. They have no idea on how to run a business. Sad, but true. 2. Anyone who saw this fact, even if in part, early on, should have clued them and everyone else into this, so that they could either improve or shut down before draggin' a whole LOTTA people down with them. 3. C'est la vie. They sucked ass in business, and this situation solidified that. Let's move the hell on, and get back to business.

Business or KoolAide Stand

[Anonymous Coward]

Three things:

1. They have no idea on how to run a business. Sad, but true.

2. Anyone who saw this fact, even if in part, early on, should have clued them and everyone else into this, so that they could either improve or shut down before draggin' a whole LOTTA people down with them.

3. C'est la vie. They sucked ass in business, and this situation solidified that. Let's move the hell on, and get back to business.