Sometimes the availability due to connection isn't controllable by the hosting company. We had half our blocks taken down for about 2 hours a few months ago when Mzima started offering more specific routes for no good reason and fucked it all up. it got fixed, but its not like there was anything we could do about it. Glad I don't work in hosting anymore (and no, I'm not unemployed)
it does it to me in Safari and FireFox on a brand new MacBook Pro w/ 4GB of RAM and 2.53Ghz Core2 Duo under OS X and cable internet at home, and the 21.3" iMac w/ 8GB of RAM and 3Ghz Core2 Duo over 100Base-TX to a Fraction DS3 from Cavtel at work, and also on a dual-core AMD with 3GB of RAM running FreeBSD as well.
I was a system admin for a while at a web hosting company, though I left in December for another company in a different sector. Quite frankly, the experience of the OP isn't that unusual. Hell, some of people on my team would accidentally nuke fully-dedicated servers and then tell the customer that it was "russian hackers" or a "raid failure" instead of just owning up to it. More often than not, I was the one getting stuck taking the call and trying to make things right, which is one of the reasons I got out of there.
We all know shit happens, and accidents can occur. That doesn't excuse not owning up to it when they do. In the case of the russian hacker excuse, the admin who came up with that gem tried to tell the senior admin that's what happened, too. When he found out that he was lied to, he pretty much went ballistic.
That said, check the following stuff:
1) if they are advertising "unlimited bandwidth," what's the actual throughput that they're allowing -- especially if they phrase the actual offer as "unlimited data transfer." Bandwidth usage is tied to memory usage, especially in the monitoring tools that come on cPanel-enabled servers, and so if you're pushing a lot of data it can spike your memory usage and
2) if they'd advertising "unlimited disk space," what are the limits at which their backups stop, if any? whats the amount of disk space? if you're doing shared hosting, which hopefully you're not, then that affects whether or not your account ends up getting moved, at least where I worked, a lot of the job on overnight rotations was moving accounts for disk space management.
3) what are their resource policies? On shared servers, we'd kick people for using more than 1% of CPU, generally. On a VPS, it could get a little higher.
4) if you're looking for a VPS, check what platform they're using for hosting, whether its Xen, VZ, etc. VZ doesn't track memory internal to the container, or really allow for swap space, etc. So, if you were buying a 256M plan from us, you'd really get 1024M memory segmentation which was the "burstable," but memcached would leak out and suck up RAM from the whole server if it weren't installed right (and a lot of people in my department didn't know this or didn't care). If you plan on using something like memcached, you'll want a hardware dedicated server, or a sufficiently large Xen container.
5) super-double check backup policy. We wouldn't back up dedicated servers, for instance. Backups could be configured to push to our array for a fee, or we could turn on local cpanel backups on the server, but if the disks really did go bad then you'd still be fucked if you weren't snapping copies back to yourself via FTP and keeping them local. If you're looking for a VPS or shared hosting, then make sure you know the backup rules -- how much data, and how it gets backed up. For instance, our setup used rsync over an NFS mount, which meant that we'd have a copy of the latest of everything that was there when the backup ran, but if something was corrupted before the backup, we'd have a backup of a broken file.
Some recommendations of companies other than the one I worked for, which I've used for various things and liked well enough are Slicehost and RootBSD. They're both Xen-based, allow a really high level of autonomy, etc. Slicehost pretty much lets you do everything yourself. You can go from no server to vps with root in about 5 minutes with no human interaction. RootBSD takes a bit longer to get set up, but their support people were always really helpful to me, and the added benefit of not being Linux-based, but using FreeBSD though OpenBSD is also a custom option as well.
Do you know any slashdotters who are actually happy about "new slashdot?" Maybe newer people who don't know any better, but I can tell you right now, it never used to take 30 seconds to wait for my post go to to "preview" mode before I could post it. And why do I need a "paste this to facebook" button on every story? Given a choice between Slashdot 2.0 and Jon Katz, I might actually prefer the Katz...
The operating temperatures of 0 to 35C are completely held within the non-operating range of -4 to 45C. Sounds like a trick way of saying the phone isn't actually meant to work.
I don't think Orwell has anything to do with putting a sensor strip that turns color if you dunk the computer in water, clearly in violation of the warranty. So, while it may be kind of a dick move, its not some secret authoritarian plot of doom.
wait... are you telling me to look up Enron on Google, or insinuating that Google is creating an Enron-like division (the naming scheme would probably follow something like GEnron?)... this is what happens when nouns become verbs:(
As cool as these guys were before I had heard of this story, anyone who earns a mention as having annoyed "NASA, Congress and the Media" jumps 10 points in book. Good cricket, sirs... good cricket.
IIRC, the families of the hostages taken in Iran during the Islamic Revolution sued the Iranian government in US Federal court, won, and were awarded damages out of assets seized by the US government. Of course, I seriously doubt that the US is going to freeze assets of the IOC to award a judgement in a lawsuit. Maybe if Bush were President, sure.... I mean, the IOC/does/ let terrorist commies compete in their games, after all, so clearly they can't be with us and must be against us...
There is a difference between being responsible and taking the fall. It's not justice for an IT guy to go to jail and for his boss who ordered him to do it to walk. That's just straight up b.s., which is what I'm trying to get out.
I was thinking jobs/jail time. Some IT worker shouldn't take the fall for doing what the policy was, if this was even in fact the policy, and it sounds like it was. The administration needs to be held accountable, and the monetary damages really just are going to ruin everyone in the county, for, as i noted above, they're going to get paid out of tax dollars.
"Anarchism" is really just sort of a pejorative term levied at what is more properly called Libertarian Socialism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment and was advocated by such thinkers as Mikhail Bakunin (who was Marx's major opponent in the First International, saying that his ideas would lead to the establishment of a "red bureaucracy"), Daniel Guerin, and in more recent times, Noam Chomsky. None of these guys are 14 year old punk rock dorks.
The Anarcho-Syndicalist CNT established a fairly successful revolution in Catalonia in the 1930s, until the Communists turned on them, split the Popular Font, and caused Franco and his allies to win. It's not just a "smash everything" ideology. It is one that calls to account all institutions of power and authority, and those that cannot show actual value by their existence are those which are deemed un-necessary and that should be done away with. It is based on direct democracy and cooperative economics, and really is a perfectly valid framework for making a livable society. Communities would just need to be smaller
So, other than the huge damages (which would get paid out of tax dollar revenue anyway), how is this a win? The only way to win is to make the administration pay -- and pay heavily -- not necessarily in money, either.
when the popular militia stands up and says enough's enough. Comardes, whether Spanish or English, American or Chinese, we are one class of people with the same hopes and aspirations. Every victory that takes Franco closer to power in Spain also takes the Fascists closer to power here, soon enough dragging all freedom-loving peoples down to barbarism and war.
Oh, wait... that shit already happened. Never mind.
the department of defense can already take control over the national guard if necessary, though typically they are under the authority of the governor and attny general of their home state. There are a bunch of Guard units in Iraq right now, for instance. The cell phone network thing is a tad bit troubling though, yes.
I don't know, I used to play with all disasters turned on in SimCity 2000, and then try and cause them.... shooting the nuclear plant with the microwave beam from the power satellite and stuff. Plenty of radiation symbols when that got done.
I live in VA Beach, which is the next city down the road (I live a few blocks from exist 20 264, and down-town Norfolk is exit 13ish), and I work in a security-related position, so we tend to keep up on news like this, but this is the first I'm hearing of it, though it looks to have gone down last week (apparently the boot.ini files were modified between 16:30 and 17:30 on 9 February, and only the computers which rebooted during that time period were affected).
It doesn't sound like the attack was particularly complex or anything, so maybe that's why it isn't exactly "newsworthy" (I also don't watch local TV news, so I don't know if they mentioned it), but still, sucks for them. I hope they have good backup policies.
Honestly, that's such an improvement over the dial-up we had from the time I was 12 until the time I was 19, that I'd still probably think that was super hot shit. I mean, when I think that I can get a 3Mbit cable connection that's twice as fast as a T1, and pay like $20 a month, which is what used to be the typical rate for "56k" dialup, why should I be greedy about wanting 100Mbit? I still feel like I'm making out like a bandit.
Yeah, but behind what? How fast is fast enough? What are we trying to win? Frankly, I doubt that I'd ever make good use of 100Mbit myself, except in rare circumstances but maybe I'm outside of 'geek' norm (which is highly likely).
I find that the easier it's gotten for me to get massive amounts of content through the tubes and into my face, the more time I spend watching it, which can't be good. Like, I had meant to do a lot of stuff yesterday, which turned into watching old South Park episodes online, and next thing I knew, it was time to go to bed and none of my projects got done. When my roommate who works from home and has to connect via a VPN moves out soon, I'm going to drop down to a cheaper/less bandwidth plan from Cox, I think, because after spending all day at work in front of a computer screen, I really don't need any encouragement to spend more time in front of one at home than I already have.
Who decides what the "reasonable" level of "international mobility in the labor market" is? How come capital can and does (in fact, MUST, for capitalism to sustain itself -- there is no such thing as "Capitalism in One Country," after all...) move across national borders all the time, but for some reason we assume that workers have to stay put?
Slashdot Mirror
The REAL Chuck Noris wouldn't have to guess the default password, he'd just round-house kick the modem until it let him in without it.
No, not Lunarpages, or DreamHost, or Bluehost. I won't say which one, but it was mentioned by another poster.
Sometimes the availability due to connection isn't controllable by the hosting company. We had half our blocks taken down for about 2 hours a few months ago when Mzima started offering more specific routes for no good reason and fucked it all up. it got fixed, but its not like there was anything we could do about it. Glad I don't work in hosting anymore (and no, I'm not unemployed)
it does it to me in Safari and FireFox on a brand new MacBook Pro w/ 4GB of RAM and 2.53Ghz Core2 Duo under OS X and cable internet at home, and the 21.3" iMac w/ 8GB of RAM and 3Ghz Core2 Duo over 100Base-TX to a Fraction DS3 from Cavtel at work, and also on a dual-core AMD with 3GB of RAM running FreeBSD as well.
I was a system admin for a while at a web hosting company, though I left in December for another company in a different sector. Quite frankly, the experience of the OP isn't that unusual. Hell, some of people on my team would accidentally nuke fully-dedicated servers and then tell the customer that it was "russian hackers" or a "raid failure" instead of just owning up to it. More often than not, I was the one getting stuck taking the call and trying to make things right, which is one of the reasons I got out of there.
We all know shit happens, and accidents can occur. That doesn't excuse not owning up to it when they do. In the case of the russian hacker excuse, the admin who came up with that gem tried to tell the senior admin that's what happened, too. When he found out that he was lied to, he pretty much went ballistic.
That said, check the following stuff:
1) if they are advertising "unlimited bandwidth," what's the actual throughput that they're allowing -- especially if they phrase the actual offer as "unlimited data transfer." Bandwidth usage is tied to memory usage, especially in the monitoring tools that come on cPanel-enabled servers, and so if you're pushing a lot of data it can spike your memory usage and
2) if they'd advertising "unlimited disk space," what are the limits at which their backups stop, if any? whats the amount of disk space? if you're doing shared hosting, which hopefully you're not, then that affects whether or not your account ends up getting moved, at least where I worked, a lot of the job on overnight rotations was moving accounts for disk space management.
3) what are their resource policies? On shared servers, we'd kick people for using more than 1% of CPU, generally. On a VPS, it could get a little higher.
4) if you're looking for a VPS, check what platform they're using for hosting, whether its Xen, VZ, etc. VZ doesn't track memory internal to the container, or really allow for swap space, etc. So, if you were buying a 256M plan from us, you'd really get 1024M memory segmentation which was the "burstable," but memcached would leak out and suck up RAM from the whole server if it weren't installed right (and a lot of people in my department didn't know this or didn't care). If you plan on using something like memcached, you'll want a hardware dedicated server, or a sufficiently large Xen container.
5) super-double check backup policy. We wouldn't back up dedicated servers, for instance. Backups could be configured to push to our array for a fee, or we could turn on local cpanel backups on the server, but if the disks really did go bad then you'd still be fucked if you weren't snapping copies back to yourself via FTP and keeping them local. If you're looking for a VPS or shared hosting, then make sure you know the backup rules -- how much data, and how it gets backed up. For instance, our setup used rsync over an NFS mount, which meant that we'd have a copy of the latest of everything that was there when the backup ran, but if something was corrupted before the backup, we'd have a backup of a broken file.
Some recommendations of companies other than the one I worked for, which I've used for various things and liked well enough are Slicehost and RootBSD. They're both Xen-based, allow a really high level of autonomy, etc. Slicehost pretty much lets you do everything yourself. You can go from no server to vps with root in about 5 minutes with no human interaction. RootBSD takes a bit longer to get set up, but their support people were always really helpful to me, and the added benefit of not being Linux-based, but using FreeBSD though OpenBSD is also a custom option as well.
Do you know any slashdotters who are actually happy about "new slashdot?" Maybe newer people who don't know any better, but I can tell you right now, it never used to take 30 seconds to wait for my post go to to "preview" mode before I could post it. And why do I need a "paste this to facebook" button on every story? Given a choice between Slashdot 2.0 and Jon Katz, I might actually prefer the Katz...
The operating temperatures of 0 to 35C are completely held within the non-operating range of -4 to 45C. Sounds like a trick way of saying the phone isn't actually meant to work.
I don't think Orwell has anything to do with putting a sensor strip that turns color if you dunk the computer in water, clearly in violation of the warranty. So, while it may be kind of a dick move, its not some secret authoritarian plot of doom.
wait... are you telling me to look up Enron on Google, or insinuating that Google is creating an Enron-like division (the naming scheme would probably follow something like GEnron?)... this is what happens when nouns become verbs :(
As cool as these guys were before I had heard of this story, anyone who earns a mention as having annoyed "NASA, Congress and the Media" jumps 10 points in book. Good cricket, sirs... good cricket.
IIRC, the families of the hostages taken in Iran during the Islamic Revolution sued the Iranian government in US Federal court, won, and were awarded damages out of assets seized by the US government. Of course, I seriously doubt that the US is going to freeze assets of the IOC to award a judgement in a lawsuit. Maybe if Bush were President, sure.... I mean, the IOC /does/ let terrorist commies compete in their games, after all, so clearly they can't be with us and must be against us...
There is a difference between being responsible and taking the fall. It's not justice for an IT guy to go to jail and for his boss who ordered him to do it to walk. That's just straight up b.s., which is what I'm trying to get out.
I was thinking jobs/jail time. Some IT worker shouldn't take the fall for doing what the policy was, if this was even in fact the policy, and it sounds like it was. The administration needs to be held accountable, and the monetary damages really just are going to ruin everyone in the county, for, as i noted above, they're going to get paid out of tax dollars.
"Anarchism" is really just sort of a pejorative term levied at what is more properly called Libertarian Socialism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment and was advocated by such thinkers as Mikhail Bakunin (who was Marx's major opponent in the First International, saying that his ideas would lead to the establishment of a "red bureaucracy"), Daniel Guerin, and in more recent times, Noam Chomsky. None of these guys are 14 year old punk rock dorks.
The Anarcho-Syndicalist CNT established a fairly successful revolution in Catalonia in the 1930s, until the Communists turned on them, split the Popular Font, and caused Franco and his allies to win. It's not just a "smash everything" ideology. It is one that calls to account all institutions of power and authority, and those that cannot show actual value by their existence are those which are deemed un-necessary and that should be done away with. It is based on direct democracy and cooperative economics, and really is a perfectly valid framework for making a livable society. Communities would just need to be smaller
So, other than the huge damages (which would get paid out of tax dollar revenue anyway), how is this a win? The only way to win is to make the administration pay -- and pay heavily -- not necessarily in money, either.
Yes, and its probably one of the greatest travesties in history, as well, and directly responsible for WWII and indirectly so for the Cold War
when the popular militia stands up and says enough's enough. Comardes, whether Spanish or English, American or Chinese, we are one class of people with the same hopes and aspirations. Every victory that takes Franco closer to power in Spain also takes the Fascists closer to power here, soon enough dragging all freedom-loving peoples down to barbarism and war.
Oh, wait... that shit already happened. Never mind.
the department of defense can already take control over the national guard if necessary, though typically they are under the authority of the governor and attny general of their home state. There are a bunch of Guard units in Iraq right now, for instance. The cell phone network thing is a tad bit troubling though, yes.
Or, a nod to some future Google cable news channel, referenced by NSA employees "in the know" when they were writing the scenario? Hmm...
I don't know, I used to play with all disasters turned on in SimCity 2000, and then try and cause them.... shooting the nuclear plant with the microwave beam from the power satellite and stuff. Plenty of radiation symbols when that got done.
I live in VA Beach, which is the next city down the road (I live a few blocks from exist 20 264, and down-town Norfolk is exit 13ish), and I work in a security-related position, so we tend to keep up on news like this, but this is the first I'm hearing of it, though it looks to have gone down last week (apparently the boot.ini files were modified between 16:30 and 17:30 on 9 February, and only the computers which rebooted during that time period were affected).
It doesn't sound like the attack was particularly complex or anything, so maybe that's why it isn't exactly "newsworthy" (I also don't watch local TV news, so I don't know if they mentioned it), but still, sucks for them. I hope they have good backup policies.
Honestly, that's such an improvement over the dial-up we had from the time I was 12 until the time I was 19, that I'd still probably think that was super hot shit. I mean, when I think that I can get a 3Mbit cable connection that's twice as fast as a T1, and pay like $20 a month, which is what used to be the typical rate for "56k" dialup, why should I be greedy about wanting 100Mbit? I still feel like I'm making out like a bandit.
Yeah, but behind what? How fast is fast enough? What are we trying to win? Frankly, I doubt that I'd ever make good use of 100Mbit myself, except in rare circumstances but maybe I'm outside of 'geek' norm (which is highly likely).
I find that the easier it's gotten for me to get massive amounts of content through the tubes and into my face, the more time I spend watching it, which can't be good. Like, I had meant to do a lot of stuff yesterday, which turned into watching old South Park episodes online, and next thing I knew, it was time to go to bed and none of my projects got done. When my roommate who works from home and has to connect via a VPN moves out soon, I'm going to drop down to a cheaper/less bandwidth plan from Cox, I think, because after spending all day at work in front of a computer screen, I really don't need any encouragement to spend more time in front of one at home than I already have.
Who decides what the "reasonable" level of "international mobility in the labor market" is? How come capital can and does (in fact, MUST, for capitalism to sustain itself -- there is no such thing as "Capitalism in One Country," after all...) move across national borders all the time, but for some reason we assume that workers have to stay put?
Texas doesn't want to put up with all of those Mormons, either.