Above.Net..

[Nate Carlson <natecars@real-time.com>]

Just curious, have any of you had REALLY REALLY bad experiences with
AboveNet?

One of our (large) clients colocates a couple servers in Above Net's
colocation room in Washington DC. The setup is 3 boxes behind 1 firewall,
all running Linux. Last night, for reasons still undetermined (anyone ever
seen 2.2.14smp lock solid without leaving ANY logs of any kind?), their
firewall box crashed, and therefore all the machines became unreachable.
Well, I called Above.Net, and the dork claimed that they had a bad router,
and that he was able to ping our machines.

I left him my pager number, and went to bed.  At around 3:30-4:00 am, he
paged me and let me know that they were still having router issues, and he
would let me know when they were fixed..

I got up around 10, and they still weren't up. I called Above.Net, and the
guy I got this morning said they hadn't had any routers, and he could not
ping our boxes. I had him go in and look on the screen, and he said
something about the kernel. In an attempt to get the boxes up quick, I had
him reset the machine without getting all the logs. (He didn't understand
it anyways, which would make it harder to get right.. it did _NOT_ sound
like a standard kernel panic/oops though.) He rebooted the machine, and
after waiting for a fsck, everything came back up.

So, 14 hours of downtime, because some guy at above.net said he could ping
our box when he couldn't. My personal bet is that they did indeed have
some router problems, and he just said "yeah, i can ping the box" without
trying, assuming it was still up. Just pisses me off, and I'm wondering if
anyone else has had similar experiences.

-- 
Nate Carlson <natecars@real-time.com>   | Phone : (952)943-8700
http://www.real-time.com                | Fax   : (952)943-8500