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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.
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?
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....
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.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
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
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.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
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:
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
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.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
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
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
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.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
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.
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
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.
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.)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
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.
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.
"To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root
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.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
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.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
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
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.]
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.
/. and see how many people are doing it now.
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
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.
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.
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.
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
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
-- Dave Aiello
I'd like to take this time to Applaud Todd Lauder for his many responces to questione here on /.
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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...
I don't actually exist.