🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <YnKAELAOKsb7EwNM@ashgate.demon.co.uk>
           lussey@arachnid.co.uk "Ken & Maureen Lussey" writes:

> Does no one else wonder why many of the commercial web sites hosted by
> Demon went dark to the world for four hours from late Saturday night
> into early Sunday morning; then again for three more hours later on
> Sunday morning?  
> 
> From an admittedly small sample (of 3) this took down two thirds of the
> commercial sites they host: yet no word of explanation or apology.

It WAS mentioned on the MOTD; obviously that has now gone, but this
remains in status@gate:

  csykes        Some commercial websites may not be visible.  Engineers are
  09:48 Aug 05  investigating.

This may have had some connection with the general networking problems
(which some had been mentioning for a few days), because that
announcement was followed fairly soon by:

  csykes        Emergency maintenance is about to take place.  This will
  12:46 Aug 05  affect part of the mail cluster, POP3, the finger
                hostname@post.demon.co.uk service, Webmail, Ecommerce
                services and DNS.  The expected outage time
                is to last around 15 minutes.
                                            
  csykes        The emergency maintenance has been completed.
  13:10 Aug 05

Finally, the commercial web came back:

  csykes        The previously mentioned problem with commercial websites
  13:10 Aug 05  has been resolved.
  

Err, you did KNOW about being able to finger the status, didn't you?

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
    distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being incr-
    easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs

In article <997119799snz@dsl.co.uk>, Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
<bhk@dsl.co.uk> writes
>  
>
>Err, you did KNOW about being able to finger the status, didn't you?
>

Yes, but after disabling the businesses of an indeterminate, but, we
understand, large number of their customers for seven hours you'd expect
some sort of follow up, explanation, apology, something.  No, of course
not, this is Demon: who never fail to pass up an opportunity to give
even an impression they care about their customers.

On the other hand their technical competence is usually excellent: in
contrast to their catastrophic customer care, billing etc.  This is
probably the first time in the six years or so we've hosted with them
that the commercial sites have gone entirely dark (...and we've known
about it).  Which explains the answer to the next obvious question: so
far, their excellent technical service delivery has just about been
worth the continuous hassle of every other aspects dealing with them.

Recent failures of the log files, and now the commercial web sites
themselves, suggest their technical competence and delivery may now be
trying to keep pace with other parts of their business. Which it why it
would still be nice to hear what happened, and why, and how they will
try to stop it happening again.  

-- 
Ken & Maureen Lussey                            
lussey@arachnid.co.uk
http://www.arachnid.co.uk/
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/