OpenStack is a virtualization and object storage infrastructure and management system. It is not an operating system or a Linux distribution. It's an application. Rackspace is a major sponsor of the project, and eats their own dog food. Nova is the VM side, and supports (to varying degrees) pretty much every hypervisor. Swift is the object store that Rackspace Cloud Files is based on.
This should not be compared to kernels, Linux or anything of the sort. "...a major threat to VMware, Citrix and Parallels datacenter management products" would be a lot better.
I used a spamtrap domain for about 5 years, then the same thing happened 2 years ago. I have not yet had my entire domain blacklisted. I did have to get rid of the wildcard that allows any local-part though. If your MTAs bounce after receipt for invalid local-part, instead of at SMTP time, you're more likely to hit a blacklisting spamtrap address (see spamcop) than if you just happen to be getting spoofed.
I went through my procmail logs with some awk/grep/sort -c and found most of the legit addresses I had used over the years. This took a few hours, as you might expect. Then I changed my virtual file to allow only those addresses and dropped the wildcard. Now all new addresses I give out have to be added before I sign up, etc. I missed a few, but since anything important had high counts (e.g. netflix@example.com) I caught all the ones that really mattered. The spam/bounce volume has been reduced by 99%. The amount of crap w/ wildcard made the inbox totally unusable anyway. It's worth the time. I did have one company I missed go out of their way to call me and get a new address when it started bouncing.:)
With good spam filtering, I now give out my main email address to many signups whom I trust. My main is kevin@somewhere.com, which obviously gets a lot of guesswork thrown at it anyway, so it's not like it will get much worse. It's interesting to note that over the years, I only had two entities leak my address to spammers, and they were caught, larted and the address blacklisted. Not really worth the pain.
BTW, never give your address to tickemaster. They will never stop. I had to threaten their legal department to make them quit.
You have the bot herder address. To do the most "damage", get it shut down. Contact the ISP abuse department who hosts it. If there's a DNS name, also contact the ISP hosting the authoritative DNS zone and possibly the registrar, who may elect to terminate the domain. If you don't get a response from the ISP, contact their upstream provider(s) (if a smaller Tier 3 ISP).
I work for an ISP in Qwest territory with about 4000 Qwest DSL customers. I'll start at the beginning.
First we had USWest ISP services in Minnesota, well they fired all of them before merging with Qwest. Now we're only represented by a general salesperson. First clue that they want to stomp the little guy.
I'll skip a few random unsurprising screwups and mention that they limit 1580 connections per DS3 connected to their ATM. The true limit is 2000+. This is either stupidity or an attempt to charge us more. It could quite possibly be either, with their record of incompetence. We pointed out their error and got them to extend the limit, but their databases still show that 1580 limit, we just run at 150%.
Before I get into the recent issues, I'll mention that they just fired their entire techsupport staff and restructured it with a bunch of trained monkeys at tier 1, moderate fools at tier 2, and the people who actually know how DSL works at tier 2.5 and 3. It's impossible to talk to tier 2.5 or 3, internal only, and we have to call them to fix their screwups all the time. They're also firing everyone at Interprise, their ATM gurus and networking guys.
I can find Qwest's reason for this as restructuring to decrease costs. However, they'd be much better off firing the managers who think giving these great people the axe is going to save them any money. I'll stop before I rant.
Please note that MSN is considered a 'Volume ISP', or rather Qwest made up that classification when they struck their deal. Under those terms, the VISP is the 'customer of record' on the DSL line. They pay Qwest for the service and bill the customer. This is not available to anyone who cannot guarantee something like 60,000 users per (some term). In order to move away from the VISP, you have to disconnect your service and pay a reconnection fee. However, to move to MSN, there is no 7-10 day downtime.
Not only do they clearly have a manipulative advantage towards MSN here, but they are so clumsy and bureaucratic that they cost us hundreds of dollars per day.
These two examples are a perfect sample of what we go through on a daily basis:
1:
Qwest.net customer goes to MSN, hates it, wants to switch to us cuz we rock. He still has his original standard DSL equipment, but also has the MSN-only USB funkything they sent him. He has to have his service disconnected, then reorder service with full installation charges to connect to us. He calls MSN (who is the 'customer of record' for his DSL line, see above) to cancel his service. The order makes it into the Qwest billing system, but someone in provisioning didn't do their job and left him connected to MSN. Order in billing system is marked 'completed 12/17/2000' but 'dslam info' which provisioning uses says it's MSN.
Customer calls Qwest to connect to us. Order goes into their system, and when it reaches provisioning, is cancelled saying 'already has dsl'. Note provisioning never reads the billing system orders.
Customer calls us to have us place the order, we tell him we can't because he's still on MSN (the Qhost system won't let us make that order, even with customer's approval). Although he is not using his MSN service, Qwest/MSN's systems are out of sync. So customer calls Qwest and they tell him we're full of it and to 'do our job'.
Next I get a conference call from 'Ann' at the 'Executive Offices' yelling at me. I explain to her that it's their own database that says it's MSN. I call Interprise to verify that he is indeed translated to MSN and they verify it is. I can hear 'Ann' sighing in the background and she clearly could give a rat's ass that this is their fault (let's fire her and save money). I get 'Ann' off the phone and call the customer back.
We contact customer service and order another disconnection, per advice of Interprise. I console the customer and explain everything involved and how it got so screwed up. He's still to this day waiting to connect back up to us.
I passed this along to our full-time Qwest haggler and he tried to work out a solution where they could simply fix their problem in the database, but last I heard nothing happened.
Total my time: 3 hours
Total dsl admin time: 2 hours
Total customer time: 3 months
2:
Qwest.net customer moves to us, doesn't want to touch MSN with a 40 foot pole. They have the old-style CAP (carrier amplitude phase) line, the kind that uses the Cisco 675, 605 or Intel 2100.
Customer calls Qwest to order change of provider, and order is processed. However, when it either never reaches provisioning, or they don't do their job when it hits their desk. Not only did they not retranslate the PVC, they mark the order as completed!
This has happened many dozens of times.
We get a call from the customer, who is still functioning through Qwest.net, and we can't turn them up. We call Interprise and it's fixed in a few minutes. Remember, they're firing those guys.
There is a 'known software bug' per some monkey we talked to once. So fix it already!
OK, that's a lot to read, but think what we go through every single day. Either Qwest needs to pay the salary of our full-time employee whose primary job is dealing with their f***ups, or maybe those quarterly bonuses are meant to buy us off.
There is a reason US/Qworst has been rated the worst service for a decade. The red tape and internal barriers are astounding. We talk to our sales rep weekly. We've sent detailed problem descriptions which get forwarded onto department heads, and we've even talked to the DSL product manager and nothing ever gets done.
Like our DSL admin said once, "I wish Qwest would hire me as a consultant, I could come in and point out every weak point, every problem, and save them tons of money." Oh yeah, and there's a damn good reason we have one single phone line from Qwest, and that's for testing only. The other 3000 or so circuits/channels are through a phone company that treats us like the customer we are.
Back on topic, I'd like to share my side of this fiasco:
I work for an ISP in Qwest territory with about 4000 Qwest DSL customers. I'll start at the beginning.
First we had USWest ISP services in Minnesota, well they fired all of them before merging with Qwest. Now we're only represented by a general salesperson. First clue that they want to stomp the little guy.
I'll skip a few random unsurprising screwups and mention that they limit 1580 connections per DS3 connected to their ATM. The true limit is 2000+. This is either stupidity or an attempt to charge us more. It could quite possibly be either, with their record of incompetence. We pointed out their error and got them to extend the limit, but their databases still show that 1580 limit, we just run at 150%.
Before I get into the recent issues, I'll mention that they just fired their entire techsupport staff and restructured it with a bunch of trained monkeys at tier 1, moderate fools at tier 2, and the people who actually know how DSL works at tier 2.5 and 3. It's impossible to talk to tier 2.5 or 3, internal only, and we have to call them to fix their screwups all the time. They're also firing everyone at Interprise, their ATM gurus and networking guys.
I can find Qwest's reason for this as restructuring to decrease costs. However, they'd be much better off firing the managers who think giving these great people the axe is going to save them any money. I'll stop before I rant.
Please note that MSN is considered a 'Volume ISP', or rather Qwest made up that classification when they struck their deal. Under those terms, the VISP is the 'customer of record' on the DSL line. They pay Qwest for the service and bill the customer. This is not available to anyone who cannot guarantee something like 60,000 users per (some term). In order to move away from the VISP, you have to disconnect your service and pay a reconnection fee. However, to move to MSN, there is no 7-10 day downtime.
Not only do they clearly have a manipulative advantage towards MSN here, but they are so clumsy and bureaucratic that they cost us hundreds of dollars per day.
These two examples are a perfect sample of what we go through on a daily basis:
1:
Qwest.net customer goes to MSN, hates it, wants to switch to us cuz we rock. He still has his original standard DSL equipment, but also has the MSN-only USB funkything they sent him. He has to have his service disconnected, then reorder service with full installation charges to connect to us. He calls MSN (who is the 'customer of record' for his DSL line, see above) to cancel his service. The order makes it into the Qwest billing system, but someone in provisioning didn't do their job and left him connected to MSN. Order in billing system is marked 'completed 12/17/2000' but 'dslam info' which provisioning uses says it's MSN.
Customer calls Qwest to connect to us. Order goes into their system, and when it reaches provisioning, is cancelled saying 'already has dsl'. Note provisioning never reads the billing system orders.
Customer calls us to have us place the order, we tell him we can't because he's still on MSN (the Qhost system won't let us make that order, even with customer's approval). Although he is not using his MSN service, Qwest/MSN's systems are out of sync. So customer calls Qwest and they tell him we're full of it and to 'do our job'.
Next I get a conference call from 'Ann' at the 'Executive Offices' yelling at me. I explain to her that it's their own database that says it's MSN. I call Interprise to verify that he is indeed translated to MSN and they verify it is. I can hear 'Ann' sighing in the background and she clearly could give a rat's ass that this is their fault (let's fire her and save money). I get 'Ann' off the phone and call the customer back.
We contact customer service and order another disconnection, per advice of Interprise. I console the customer and explain everything involved and how it got so screwed up. He's still to this day waiting to connect back up to us.
I passed this along to our full-time Qwest haggler and he tried to work out a solution where they could simply fix their problem in the database, but last I heard nothing happened.
Total my time: 3 hours
Total dsl admin time: 2 hours
Total customer time: 3 months
2:
Qwest.net customer moves to us, doesn't want to touch MSN with a 40 foot pole. They have the old-style CAP (carrier amplitude phase) line, the kind that uses the Cisco 675, 605 or Intel 2100.
Customer calls Qwest to order change of provider, and order is processed. However, when it either never reaches provisioning, or they don't do their job when it hits their desk. Not only did they not retranslate the PVC, they mark the order as completed!
This has happened many dozens of times.
We get a call from the customer, who is still functioning through Qwest.net, and we can't turn them up. We call Interprise and it's fixed in a few minutes. Remember, they're firing those guys.
There is a 'known software bug' per some monkey we talked to once. So fix it already!
OK, that's a lot to read, but think what we go through every single day. Either Qwest needs to pay the salary of our full-time employee whose primary job is dealing with their f***ups, or maybe those quarterly bonuses are meant to buy us off.
There is a reason US/Qworst has been rated the worst service for a decade. The red tape and internal barriers are astounding. We talk to our sales rep weekly. We've sent detailed problem descriptions which get forwarded onto department heads, and we've even talked to the DSL product manager and nothing ever gets done.
Like our DSL admin said once, "I wish Qwest would hire me as a consultant, I could come in and point out every weak point, every problem, and save them tons of money." Oh yeah, and there's a damn good reason we have one single phone line from Qwest, and that's for testing only. The other 3000 or so circuits/channels are through a phone company that treats us like the customer we are.
This is the greatest thing to come to PC in years. Now if only it had an access card slot and a satellite receiver, TiVO would have some serious competition (which, since they still haven't turned a profit, might be a bad thing). I, for one, am tired of dragging out the 36-foot cable every Wednesday to record Enterprise for the guys at work (our UPN station is impossible to receive off-air).
I second the motion for Linux drivers. Imagine a set-top box for the geeks which can play games, do all your usual duties, and all on a screen which is actually readable!
"If the thieves stop going to those stores because they bet profiles, maybe prices will drop."
That is the consumer's hope, but the reality is that once prices go up they never come back down. If stores can do anything to decrease loss, it goes straight into their pockets.
Have you ever heard of a shop declaring that it is lowering prices thanks to a decrease in shoplifting? No, of course not. That goes to shareholders.
For the record, I will never patronize Borders again, and hope that enough of the word gets out to enrage a noticeable portion of their customers.
At least once a week I deal with auto-generated or paranoid admins declaring 'port scanning' by our DNS server, mail server, etc. Most of the time, it's simply because of far-too-restrictive firewall rules. These newbies think DNS or IMAP attempting to respond to incrementing ports from where the query originated is 'scanning' their network. They need an 'eq any-established' rule.
The auto-arin-lookup-form-letter-firewall needs to go. Internet security has reached a level of stupidified paranoia. For the rest of these guys who call because some wu-ftpd worm scanned their net, well.. OBVIOUSLY YOUR FIREWALL IS DOING ITS JOB! NOW GO AWAY!
It took quite some time for my original question to be posted, and we were on a critical schedule. We ended up buying a whole new server and internal RAID controller. Details follow:
After much shopping, questions, advice and temporary insanity, we decided to go for a new Linux box to handle the mail. Apparently, the load wasn't only coming from disk i/o wait; the kernel was using 70% cpu. We chose a Dual PIII/500 setup on an Asus P3B-DS, 512M ECC SDRAM (less than before, but prices are so high right now, and we figure processes should end sooner on this box), Intel Pro/100, Seagate Barracuda for system, six Seagate Cheetahs for spool and mail storage, and a Mylex eXtremeRAID 1100 (w/ the 233MHz i960).
It was configured with 5 spindles in RAID 5, with 1 as a hot spare, and then partitioned in half. I'm confident this badarse controller can keep up on the writes, with minimal performance hit. Preliminary results with bonnie are inconclusive, since it's working with one huge file, rather than thousands of small files. If write performance lags once it goes online (this Sunday am), we'll split it into 0+1.
Exim, QPOP, and IMAPD were hax0red to use a double-hashed directory structure. ie: "spin" would reside in/var/mail/s/.p/spin (the dot was required for those who have a single digit username). This should eliminate any overhead that ext2fs may have with large directories.
Thanks for all your advice, keep it coming. If you're a gamer, check out http://www.xmission.com/quake
-Kevin Blackham Xmission Internet Salt Lake City, UT
If you file a message by dragging the header, it markes the old message to be deleted, but will not delete them upon a purge. Outlook Exp. 4 used semicolons to separate recipients. Bad voodoo in that gatesware. Keep away. Use MUTT.
I support Netscape daily, and it's mostly identical across all platforms. You can likely point your paths in your Linux installation to a mounted vfat drive. It's something I should have tried (but I avoid using doze). One drawback is Netscape 4.6x didn't support multiple pop boxes within one configuration. I'm worthless, I haven't used 4.7 yet. Does it?
Sure, letting everyone create their own TLD is a shitty idea. Why not at least add a few that make some fucking sense?
I remember years ago, some flaky proposition to add more TLDs like.arts.food.rec, and some others. Of course, our former monopoly shot that one down. There's a million 2 digit TLD's, that are utterly useless and abused (let's pay $200 a year for a.md, talk about a ripoff). Do some of these countries even have a T1?
How about at least adding some more basic top level domains? Most needed, a personal homepage type.. ie:.home - Why not put it up to a vote somewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
OpenStack is a virtualization and object storage infrastructure and management system. It is not an operating system or a Linux distribution. It's an application. Rackspace is a major sponsor of the project, and eats their own dog food. Nova is the VM side, and supports (to varying degrees) pretty much every hypervisor. Swift is the object store that Rackspace Cloud Files is based on.
This should not be compared to kernels, Linux or anything of the sort. "...a major threat to VMware, Citrix and Parallels datacenter management products" would be a lot better.
I used a spamtrap domain for about 5 years, then the same thing happened 2 years ago. I have not yet had my entire domain blacklisted. I did have to get rid of the wildcard that allows any local-part though. If your MTAs bounce after receipt for invalid local-part, instead of at SMTP time, you're more likely to hit a blacklisting spamtrap address (see spamcop) than if you just happen to be getting spoofed.
:)
I went through my procmail logs with some awk/grep/sort -c and found most of the legit addresses I had used over the years. This took a few hours, as you might expect. Then I changed my virtual file to allow only those addresses and dropped the wildcard. Now all new addresses I give out have to be added before I sign up, etc. I missed a few, but since anything important had high counts (e.g. netflix@example.com) I caught all the ones that really mattered. The spam/bounce volume has been reduced by 99%. The amount of crap w/ wildcard made the inbox totally unusable anyway. It's worth the time. I did have one company I missed go out of their way to call me and get a new address when it started bouncing.
With good spam filtering, I now give out my main email address to many signups whom I trust. My main is kevin@somewhere.com, which obviously gets a lot of guesswork thrown at it anyway, so it's not like it will get much worse. It's interesting to note that over the years, I only had two entities leak my address to spammers, and they were caught, larted and the address blacklisted. Not really worth the pain.
BTW, never give your address to tickemaster. They will never stop. I had to threaten their legal department to make them quit.
You have the bot herder address. To do the most "damage", get it shut down. Contact the ISP abuse department who hosts it. If there's a DNS name, also contact the ISP hosting the authoritative DNS zone and possibly the registrar, who may elect to terminate the domain. If you don't get a response from the ISP, contact their upstream provider(s) (if a smaller Tier 3 ISP).
Whois is your friend.
I work for an ISP in Qwest territory with about 4000 Qwest DSL customers. I'll start at the beginning.
First we had USWest ISP services in Minnesota, well they fired all of them before merging with Qwest. Now we're only represented by a general salesperson. First clue that they want to stomp the little guy.
I'll skip a few random unsurprising screwups and mention that they limit 1580 connections per DS3 connected to their ATM. The true limit is 2000+. This is either stupidity or an attempt to charge us more. It could quite possibly be either, with their record of incompetence. We pointed out their error and got them to extend the limit, but their databases still show that 1580 limit, we just run at 150%.
Before I get into the recent issues, I'll mention that they just fired their entire techsupport staff and restructured it with a bunch of trained monkeys at tier 1, moderate fools at tier 2, and the people who actually know how DSL works at tier 2.5 and 3. It's impossible to talk to tier 2.5 or 3, internal only, and we have to call them to fix their screwups all the time. They're also firing everyone at Interprise, their ATM gurus and networking guys.
I can find Qwest's reason for this as restructuring to decrease costs. However, they'd be much better off firing the managers who think giving these great people the axe is going to save them any money. I'll stop before I rant.
Please note that MSN is considered a 'Volume ISP', or rather Qwest made up that classification when they struck their deal. Under those terms, the VISP is the 'customer of record' on the DSL line. They pay Qwest for the service and bill the customer. This is not available to anyone who cannot guarantee something like 60,000 users per (some term). In order to move away from the VISP, you have to disconnect your service and pay a reconnection fee. However, to move to MSN, there is no 7-10 day downtime.
Not only do they clearly have a manipulative advantage towards MSN here, but they are so clumsy and bureaucratic that they cost us hundreds of dollars per day.
These two examples are a perfect sample of what we go through on a daily basis:
1:
Qwest.net customer goes to MSN, hates it, wants to switch to us cuz we rock. He still has his original standard DSL equipment, but also has the MSN-only USB funkything they sent him. He has to have his service disconnected, then reorder service with full installation charges to connect to us. He calls MSN (who is the 'customer of record' for his DSL line, see above) to cancel his service. The order makes it into the Qwest billing system, but someone in provisioning didn't do their job and left him connected to MSN. Order in billing system is marked 'completed 12/17/2000' but 'dslam info' which provisioning uses says it's MSN.
Customer calls Qwest to connect to us. Order goes into their system, and when it reaches provisioning, is cancelled saying 'already has dsl'. Note provisioning never reads the billing system orders.
Customer calls us to have us place the order, we tell him we can't because he's still on MSN (the Qhost system won't let us make that order, even with customer's approval). Although he is not using his MSN service, Qwest/MSN's systems are out of sync. So customer calls Qwest and they tell him we're full of it and to 'do our job'.
Next I get a conference call from 'Ann' at the 'Executive Offices' yelling at me. I explain to her that it's their own database that says it's MSN. I call Interprise to verify that he is indeed translated to MSN and they verify it is. I can hear 'Ann' sighing in the background and she clearly could give a rat's ass that this is their fault (let's fire her and save money). I get 'Ann' off the phone and call the customer back.
We contact customer service and order another disconnection, per advice of Interprise. I console the customer and explain everything involved and how it got so screwed up. He's still to this day waiting to connect back up to us.
I passed this along to our full-time Qwest haggler and he tried to work out a solution where they could simply fix their problem in the database, but last I heard nothing happened.
Total my time: 3 hours
Total dsl admin time: 2 hours
Total customer time: 3 months
2:
Qwest.net customer moves to us, doesn't want to touch MSN with a 40 foot pole. They have the old-style CAP (carrier amplitude phase) line, the kind that uses the Cisco 675, 605 or Intel 2100.
Customer calls Qwest to order change of provider, and order is processed. However, when it either never reaches provisioning, or they don't do their job when it hits their desk. Not only did they not retranslate the PVC, they mark the order as completed!
This has happened many dozens of times.
We get a call from the customer, who is still functioning through Qwest.net, and we can't turn them up. We call Interprise and it's fixed in a few minutes. Remember, they're firing those guys.
There is a 'known software bug' per some monkey we talked to once. So fix it already!
OK, that's a lot to read, but think what we go through every single day. Either Qwest needs to pay the salary of our full-time employee whose primary job is dealing with their f***ups, or maybe those quarterly bonuses are meant to buy us off.
There is a reason US/Qworst has been rated the worst service for a decade. The red tape and internal barriers are astounding. We talk to our sales rep weekly. We've sent detailed problem descriptions which get forwarded onto department heads, and we've even talked to the DSL product manager and nothing ever gets done.
Like our DSL admin said once, "I wish Qwest would hire me as a consultant, I could come in and point out every weak point, every problem, and save them tons of money." Oh yeah, and there's a damn good reason we have one single phone line from Qwest, and that's for testing only. The other 3000 or so circuits/channels are through a phone company that treats us like the customer we are.
Umm okay man. I'm sure Ricco didn't appreciate that.
Back on topic, I'd like to share my side of this fiasco:
I work for an ISP in Qwest territory with about 4000 Qwest DSL customers. I'll start at the beginning.
First we had USWest ISP services in Minnesota, well they fired all of them before merging with Qwest. Now we're only represented by a general salesperson. First clue that they want to stomp the little guy.
I'll skip a few random unsurprising screwups and mention that they limit 1580 connections per DS3 connected to their ATM. The true limit is 2000+. This is either stupidity or an attempt to charge us more. It could quite possibly be either, with their record of incompetence. We pointed out their error and got them to extend the limit, but their databases still show that 1580 limit, we just run at 150%.
Before I get into the recent issues, I'll mention that they just fired their entire techsupport staff and restructured it with a bunch of trained monkeys at tier 1, moderate fools at tier 2, and the people who actually know how DSL works at tier 2.5 and 3. It's impossible to talk to tier 2.5 or 3, internal only, and we have to call them to fix their screwups all the time. They're also firing everyone at Interprise, their ATM gurus and networking guys.
I can find Qwest's reason for this as restructuring to decrease costs. However, they'd be much better off firing the managers who think giving these great people the axe is going to save them any money. I'll stop before I rant.
Please note that MSN is considered a 'Volume ISP', or rather Qwest made up that classification when they struck their deal. Under those terms, the VISP is the 'customer of record' on the DSL line. They pay Qwest for the service and bill the customer. This is not available to anyone who cannot guarantee something like 60,000 users per (some term). In order to move away from the VISP, you have to disconnect your service and pay a reconnection fee. However, to move to MSN, there is no 7-10 day downtime.
Not only do they clearly have a manipulative advantage towards MSN here, but they are so clumsy and bureaucratic that they cost us hundreds of dollars per day.
These two examples are a perfect sample of what we go through on a daily basis:
1:
Qwest.net customer goes to MSN, hates it, wants to switch to us cuz we rock. He still has his original standard DSL equipment, but also has the MSN-only USB funkything they sent him. He has to have his service disconnected, then reorder service with full installation charges to connect to us. He calls MSN (who is the 'customer of record' for his DSL line, see above) to cancel his service. The order makes it into the Qwest billing system, but someone in provisioning didn't do their job and left him connected to MSN. Order in billing system is marked 'completed 12/17/2000' but 'dslam info' which provisioning uses says it's MSN.
Customer calls Qwest to connect to us. Order goes into their system, and when it reaches provisioning, is cancelled saying 'already has dsl'. Note provisioning never reads the billing system orders.
Customer calls us to have us place the order, we tell him we can't because he's still on MSN (the Qhost system won't let us make that order, even with customer's approval). Although he is not using his MSN service, Qwest/MSN's systems are out of sync. So customer calls Qwest and they tell him we're full of it and to 'do our job'.
Next I get a conference call from 'Ann' at the 'Executive Offices' yelling at me. I explain to her that it's their own database that says it's MSN. I call Interprise to verify that he is indeed translated to MSN and they verify it is. I can hear 'Ann' sighing in the background and she clearly could give a rat's ass that this is their fault (let's fire her and save money). I get 'Ann' off the phone and call the customer back.
We contact customer service and order another disconnection, per advice of Interprise. I console the customer and explain everything involved and how it got so screwed up. He's still to this day waiting to connect back up to us.
I passed this along to our full-time Qwest haggler and he tried to work out a solution where they could simply fix their problem in the database, but last I heard nothing happened.
Total my time: 3 hours
Total dsl admin time: 2 hours
Total customer time: 3 months
2:
Qwest.net customer moves to us, doesn't want to touch MSN with a 40 foot pole. They have the old-style CAP (carrier amplitude phase) line, the kind that uses the Cisco 675, 605 or Intel 2100.
Customer calls Qwest to order change of provider, and order is processed. However, when it either never reaches provisioning, or they don't do their job when it hits their desk. Not only did they not retranslate the PVC, they mark the order as completed!
This has happened many dozens of times.
We get a call from the customer, who is still functioning through Qwest.net, and we can't turn them up. We call Interprise and it's fixed in a few minutes. Remember, they're firing those guys.
There is a 'known software bug' per some monkey we talked to once. So fix it already!
OK, that's a lot to read, but think what we go through every single day. Either Qwest needs to pay the salary of our full-time employee whose primary job is dealing with their f***ups, or maybe those quarterly bonuses are meant to buy us off.
There is a reason US/Qworst has been rated the worst service for a decade. The red tape and internal barriers are astounding. We talk to our sales rep weekly. We've sent detailed problem descriptions which get forwarded onto department heads, and we've even talked to the DSL product manager and nothing ever gets done.
Like our DSL admin said once, "I wish Qwest would hire me as a consultant, I could come in and point out every weak point, every problem, and save them tons of money." Oh yeah, and there's a damn good reason we have one single phone line from Qwest, and that's for testing only. The other 3000 or so circuits/channels are through a phone company that treats us like the customer we are.
This is the greatest thing to come to PC in years. Now if only it had an access card slot and a satellite receiver, TiVO would have some serious competition (which, since they still haven't turned a profit, might be a bad thing). I, for one, am tired of dragging out the 36-foot cable every Wednesday to record Enterprise for the guys at work (our UPN station is impossible to receive off-air).
:)
I second the motion for Linux drivers. Imagine a set-top box for the geeks which can play games, do all your usual duties, and all on a screen which is actually readable!
The future is now.
"If the thieves stop going to those stores because they bet profiles, maybe prices will drop."
That is the consumer's hope, but the reality is that once prices go up they never come back down. If stores can do anything to decrease loss, it goes straight into their pockets.
Have you ever heard of a shop declaring that it is lowering prices thanks to a decrease in shoplifting? No, of course not. That goes to shareholders.
For the record, I will never patronize Borders again, and hope that enough of the word gets out to enrage a noticeable portion of their customers.
At least once a week I deal with auto-generated or paranoid admins declaring 'port scanning' by our DNS server, mail server, etc. Most of the time, it's simply because of far-too-restrictive firewall rules. These newbies think DNS or IMAP attempting to respond to incrementing ports from where the query originated is 'scanning' their network. They need an 'eq any-established' rule.
The auto-arin-lookup-form-letter-firewall needs to go. Internet security has reached a level of stupidified paranoia. For the rest of these guys who call because some wu-ftpd worm scanned their net, well.. OBVIOUSLY YOUR FIREWALL IS DOING ITS JOB! NOW GO AWAY!
-Kevin@XM
After much shopping, questions, advice and temporary insanity, we decided to go for a new Linux box to handle the mail. Apparently, the load wasn't only coming from disk i/o wait; the kernel was using 70% cpu. We chose a Dual PIII/500 setup on an Asus P3B-DS, 512M ECC SDRAM (less than before, but prices are so high right now, and we figure processes should end sooner on this box), Intel Pro/100, Seagate Barracuda for system, six Seagate Cheetahs for spool and mail storage, and a Mylex eXtremeRAID 1100 (w/ the 233MHz i960).
It was configured with 5 spindles in RAID 5, with 1 as a hot spare, and then partitioned in half. I'm confident this badarse controller can keep up on the writes, with minimal performance hit. Preliminary results with bonnie are inconclusive, since it's working with one huge file, rather than thousands of small files. If write performance lags once it goes online (this Sunday am), we'll split it into 0+1.
Exim, QPOP, and IMAPD were hax0red to use a double-hashed directory structure. ie: "spin" would reside in /var/mail/s/.p/spin (the dot was required for those who have a single digit username). This should eliminate any overhead that ext2fs may have with large directories.
Thanks for all your advice, keep it coming. If you're a gamer, check out http://www.xmission.com/quake
-Kevin Blackham Xmission Internet Salt Lake City, UT
If you file a message by dragging the header, it markes the old message to be deleted, but will not delete them upon a purge. Outlook Exp. 4 used semicolons to separate recipients. Bad voodoo in that gatesware. Keep away. Use MUTT.
I support Netscape daily, and it's mostly identical across all platforms. You can likely point your paths in your Linux installation to a mounted vfat drive. It's something I should have tried (but I avoid using doze). One drawback is Netscape 4.6x didn't support multiple pop boxes within one configuration. I'm worthless, I haven't used 4.7 yet. Does it?
I remember years ago, some flaky proposition to add more TLDs like .arts .food .rec, and some others. Of course, our former monopoly shot that one down. There's a million 2 digit TLD's, that are utterly useless and abused (let's pay $200 a year for a .md, talk about a ripoff). Do some of these countries even have a T1?
How about at least adding some more basic top level domains? Most needed, a personal homepage type .. ie: .home - Why not put it up to a vote somewhere?
Bah!