Now. Who on this list can break my record for longest outage?

My Server turned to molasses at 1:45 pm 10/9

Its now 2:15 pm 10/10

I am getting in excess of 1100 ms pings to my server1 209.217.19.33 (can you please confirm these pings)

Still no reply from Catalog. BUT I did get a email that cracked me up about 20 minutes ago, that isn't even close to the solution!! This is good! Since I am not even associated with their dns server..typical response from tech support

------START---------
We had an outage this morning that caused our DNS Servers to go off-line.
The issues has been resolved and everything is up and running again. If you
are still having problems please let us know.

Thank you,
Tech Support
888-932-4376
support@catalog.com
------END-----------


[Edited by PepsiCoke on 12-10-2000 at 07:26 PM]

your pings and traceroutes look good from here, so if your still experiencing the problem you might want to throw up a traceroute as it doesnt appear to be a catalog.com problem

Steve

===================================================
=== VisualRoute report on 10-Dec-00 2:49:54 PM ===
===================================================

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Hop | % Loss | IP Address | Node Name | ms |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0 | | 24.237.2.145 | cable-145-2-237-24.anchorageak.net | |
| 1 | 10 | 24.237.0.1 | inetgw.anchorageak.net | 43 |
| 2 | | 208.138.129.31 | - | 36 |
| 3 | | 208.155.87.122 | - | 44 |
| 4 | | 206.96.48.227 | - | 65 |
| 5 | | 157.130.182.5 | POS1-3.GW8.SEA1.ALTER.NET | 56 |
| 6 | | 152.63.105.218 | 109.ATM2-0.XR1.SEA1.ALTER.NET | 46 |
| 7 | | 146.188.200.65 | 195.ATM5-0.BR1.SEA1.ALTER.NET | 43 |
| 8 | | 137.39.250.49 | SL-BB2-H12-0.SPRINTLINK.NET | 53 |
| 9 | | 144.232.6.17 | sl-bb10-sea-2-1.sprintlink.net | 45 |
| 10 | | 144.232.6.118 | sl-gw11-sea-8-0.sprintlink.net | 60 |
| 11 | | 144.232.236.34 | sl-ethoscomm-2-0.sprintlink.net | 993 |
| 12 | 10 | 209.217.19.33 | aux-209-217-19-33.oklahoma.net | 1015 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
VisualRoute Report for 209.217.19.33 produced at 2:49 PM on December 10, 2000.
Roundtrip time to 209.217.19.33 (209.217.19.33) average = 1015ms min = 865ms max = 1057ms

here is mine i took out the first couple of hops because they are irrelivent to the trace (internal stuff)

traceroute to 209.217.19.33 (209.217.19.33), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 4 spc-cal-4-Serial12-0-0.Sprint-Canada.Net 207.107.204.161) 6.199 ms 5.268 ms 5.977 ms
5 204.50.128.133 (204.50.128.133) 5.417 ms 5.844 ms 9.266 ms
6 204.50.128.158 (204.50.128.158) 16.536 ms 15.988 ms 17.030 ms
7 sl-gw11-sea-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.236.17) 67.145 ms 68.545 ms 67.081 ms
8 sl-ethoscomm-2-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.236.34) 132.295 ms 129.669 ms 129.113 ms
9 aux-209-217-19-33.oklahoma.net (209.217.19.33) 133.051 ms 136.661 ms 132.517 ms

when i look at the two traces i see a difference at hop 7 for me
7 sl-gw11-sea-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.236.17) 67.145 ms 68.545 ms 67.081 ms
and hop ten for you
| 10 | | 144.232.6.118 | sl-gw11-sea-8-0.sprintlink.net | 60

that appears to be the problem hop for you it means anyone going through sl-gw11-sea-8-0.sprintlink.net is going to be experiencing this problem so it isnt directly a catalog problem its a sprintlink problem. as sprintlink appears to be a direct provider for catalog you can inform them of this and they should be able to get it fixed


Steve

[Edited by Keeg on 12-10-2000 at 07:02 PM]

Here's a traceroute from my server at VDI. You might want to check with your isp.


root@wind [/scripts]# traceroute 209.217.19.33
traceroute to 209.217.19.33 (209.217.19.33), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 f0-0.core1.cftnnj.inet.vdi.net (216.74.64.1) 1.546 ms 2.353 ms 4.983 ms
2 serial3-0-4.hsa1.wee1.level3.net (63.211.88.5) 2.587 ms 2.025 ms 2.084 ms
3 lo0.mp2.Weehawken1.level3.net (209.247.8.254) 3.067 ms 6.165 ms 2.714 ms
4 pos8-0.core1.Chicago1.level3.net (209.247.10.162) 22.715 ms 23.082 ms 22.590 ms
5 level3-1.CR-1.uschcg.savvis.net (209.176.95.221) 23.597 ms 24.300 ms 23.068 ms
6 atm8-0-045.CR-1.usdlls.savvis.net (209.83.222.26) 52.030 ms 51.277 ms 51.769 ms
7 ETHOS-1.usdlls.savvis.net (209.44.32.10) 52.353 ms 51.336 ms 51.533 ms
8 dal-net70.dallas.net (209.44.40.70) 106.965 ms 107.295 ms 107.461 ms
9 aux-209-217-19-33.oklahoma.net (209.217.19.33) 111.513 ms 110.593 ms 107.880 ms

And here is one from my home in Montreal:

[root@webfors fors]# traceroute 209.217.19.33
traceroute to 209.217.19.33 (209.217.19.33), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 modemcable001.88-200-24.mtl.mc.videotron.ca (24.200.88.1) 23.269 ms 11.841 ms 21.030 ms
2 fa0-tdl-lachine.videotron.net (207.96.164.57) 12.895 ms 23.275 ms 46.563 ms
3 fddi9-tdl-beaubien.videotron.net (207.96.164.41) 37.735 ms 15.804 ms 29.635 ms
4 ia-tlpt-bb01-fe1-0-0.videotron.net (207.96.164.26) 34.341 ms 26.514 ms 8.655 ms
5 ia-cduc-bb02-ge2-0.videotron.net (207.253.253.140) 28.442 ms 16.691 ms 19.559 ms
6 208.30.212.13 (208.30.212.13) 29.178 ms 30.956 ms 22.789 ms
7 sl-bb10-pen-6-2.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.45) 28.018 ms 22.865 ms 38.775 ms
8 sl-bb21-pen-10-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.5.153) 38.370 ms 31.084 ms 22.862 ms
9 sl-bb10-sea-6-2.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.141) 87.030 ms 114.671 ms 91.088 ms
10 sl-gw11-sea-7-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.6.126) 89.992 ms 111.037 ms 116.890 ms
11 sl-ethoscomm-2-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.236.34) 144.687 ms 155.054 ms 166.063 ms
12 aux-209-217-19-33.oklahoma.net (209.217.19.33) 155.194 ms 167.470 ms 155.097 ms

Looks good to me.

I emailed noc@sprintlink.net, doubt i will get any reply back.

I dont understand why i am the only one getting this slow down, when you guys are hitting it with no problems. I even tried dollar.com and got the same results.

Even when i ping server1 from server2 (in california) its under 100 ms

---------------

| 9 | | 144.232.6.17 | sl-bb10-sea-2-1.sprintlink.net | 55 |
| 10 | | 144.232.6.118 | sl-gw11-sea-8-0.sprintlink.net | 55 |
| 11 | 10 | 144.232.236.34 | sl-ethoscomm-2-0.sprintlink.net | 1104 |
| 12 | 30 | 209.217.19.33 | aux-209-217-19-33.oklahoma.net | 1062 |

Can someone recommend a new dedicated server? I've had it with Catalog, it seems i have to baby my server 24 hours a day.

I am on their RAQ3, 512 RAM, 30 gig HD, 100 gigs transfer for $379 / zero setup fees

Who do you recommend on that? I will be contacting my new colo Hispeed tomorrow to see if this can be arranged, If not, hows 4webspace? I emailed them thursday, and never did get a response from them.

actually what i meant you should do is contact catalog showing them that slowdown link not contacting sprintlink directly as that will do you no good whatsoever. its quite simple really catalog pays sprintlink thousands of dollars a month so they have dedicated reps to look after their lines you dont pay sprinklink a cent so they could care less about your email. (im not trying to be harsh thats just the reality of it.)and if you didnt get an autoresponder from 4webspace they didnt get your email so you should resend it.

Steve

already did that...still waiting for their response

Catalog's service has been completly ridiculous for the last 3 weeks or so. I've had no less than 50 interruptions to my service, all logged with my netwhistle.com error logs.

Worse, their technical support has not apologised a SINGLE TIME for ANY of the downtimes. Each email I send off to them is responded with some sort of excuse or a traceroute showing that 'it was down 30 minutes ago but everything is okay now'. I quote:

<quote>
As of now the issue has been resolved.
If it were not for the redundant connections and BGP config all sites would
have been unreachable for the past 9HRS.
We do not offer uptime guarantees on standard hosting packages.
<end quote>

Yeah, they don't guarantee uptimes. No apologies, no offers of refunds, just excuses. The last joke I got was something this:

<quote>
The network was down due to 5 servers that were engaged in a DDOS attack.
We have taken them off line and are investigating this with the aid of the
FBI.

Regards,
Joe Sullivan
Dedicated Hosting
Operations Manager
Catalog.com, Inc
<End quote>

Wow. Catalog seems to be having a LOT of bad luck, huh. All the supposedly *redundant* network backbone connections die, and they get a DDOS attack as well.

All this wouldn't be so bad if they had shown good positive attitude to us customers. But no, all they did was promise that things would be solved (they still aren't!). No apologies. No offers to like give us even a measely dollar off this month's price. They have a supposed network uptime page now after we all bugged them in their forums to do so. But it is never updated, and always shows that things are fine.

They USED to be good, but this round of network problems has shown their true colors.

I would advise anybody with a sane mind to stay away from them.

I'm moving my Linux box - if there is any better host out there willing to make me a good rescue offer, please let me know.

There's a great site with links to dozens and dozens of online traceroute scripts so you can traceroute to any server from all over the world. Can you guess the URL of that site?

http://www.traceroute.org/ :)

wtww said it just right, i brought the exact same arguement to this forum a few weeks ago. You should NOT have to babysit your server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

One thing that really pisses me off is they dont have any way for you to get ahold of their NOC, and i know for a fact its not monitored 24 hours a day, if it was, then maybe i wouldnt be getting 1000 ms + tracerts all weekend..

i honestly think you guys are being to hard on catalog, dos attacks do happen and backbones do go down, you would be suprised how often it really does happen, in the past 2 weeks we have had one dos attack and 3 backbone failures none of these fortunatly affected my network, but they could have. PepsiCoke i looked at your problem earlier today and honestly that should not have been an issue, so one sprintlink hop was screwwy, that means you couldnt get to your site but most every one else could. im not trying to make excuses for catalog, hell they are a competitor, but lets be fair with the slinging, that one issue doesnt deserve it. The other issue i know nothing about so ill leave it be


Steve

OMG. It seems you don't have a server with Catalog!

My server goes down AT LEAST once a day for at LEAST 20 minutes. I have given CATALOG the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT EVERY TIME!

I don't give a crap if I pay $9.99 a month of $9999.99 a month, The company that is providing the server should at least have a reliable network. which it's very very much known that CATALOG DOES NOT HAVE.

I could be ALOT more harder on this company. I am spending $379 a month for a server that had to be moved ONCE to their "sprint backbone" because their @HOME network was always going down. So don't get me started on "being to hard" on this damn company. All I ask is they reply to my damn emails, and phone calls and stop me from monitoring my server 24 hours a day!


And before you start backing a company you have never had experance with, its best you keep your comments to yourself, until you, yourself gets a server with them, and you stack about 200 sites on it, and turn around and ask for help when the network goes down, you wont be defending them then, i bet your whole company on that.



[Edited by PepsiCoke on 12-11-2000 at 06:30 AM]

Ack

http://amail.co.uk/cgi-bin/atrace.pl?ip1=www.hosting.net&who=YES

I assume this is the server you are reffering to.

Well, I think Steve's point was that we're getting acceptable ping times, etc. I tried it, nothing bad at all. As for a history of being down, support, etc., you have reason to gripe of course. I don't think Steve was including that (by his statements), more just this latest experience. Are you still getting slow times?

I realize you are moving (or at least so it seems), so it might be pointless but just wondering.

I was on a host that had network problems (constantly, daily, all the time!), so I know how fustrating it is. But that same network is much better now, and maybe you should check out the VDI hosts, rackspace or Steve's service, and get on a good solid line with a good company. (I know you were disappointed with cobaltracks as well). We need to get you on something GOOD for a change! :)

Originally posted by wtww
Yeah, they don't guarantee uptimes. No apologies, no offers of refunds, just excuses. The last joke I got was something this:

Well you shouldn't have signed up with them if this is such a problem... It is clearly stated in the contract that you have to sign and mail/fax to them! Also after all the recent network issues I had contacted them and calmly explained that the quality of service was unacceptable and makes it very hard for me to operate a business/website if it's always down and they were nice enough to refund me for this month!


<quote>
The network was down due to 5 servers that were engaged in a DDOS attack.
We have taken them off line and are investigating this with the aid of the
FBI.

Regards,
Joe Sullivan
Dedicated Hosting
Operations Manager
Catalog.com, Inc
<End quote>

Wow. Catalog seems to be having a LOT of bad luck, huh. All the supposedly *redundant* network backbone connections die, and they get a DDOS attack as well.
I don't know how this is a joke to you? My server was also attacked, although we found the trogan and remove it before any harm was done...

Alan Barber
Advanced-Basic.Com

Originally posted by Dexter
Originally posted by wtww
Yeah, they don't guarantee uptimes. No apologies, no offers of refunds, just excuses. The last joke I got was something this:

Well you shouldn't have signed up with them if this is such a problem... It is clearly stated in the contract that you have to sign and mail/fax to them! Also after all the recent network issues I had contacted them and calmly explained that the quality of service was unacceptable and makes it very hard for me to operate a business/website if it's always down and they were nice enough to refund me for this month!





<quote>
The network was down due to 5 servers that were engaged in a DDOS attack.
We have taken them off line and are investigating this with the aid of the
FBI.

Regards,
Joe Sullivan
Dedicated Hosting
Operations Manager
Catalog.com, Inc
<End quote>

Wow. Catalog seems to be having a LOT of bad luck, huh. All the supposedly *redundant* network backbone connections die, and they get a DDOS attack as well.
I don't know how this is a joke to you? My server was also attacked, although we found the trogan and remove it before any harm was done...

Alan Barber
Advanced-Basic.Com


I didn't sign any contract which I had to fax to them

Yah it is a joke. They claim to be fully redundant on their website with "3 fiber lines going into each facility" not very redundant when your server had to be moved from @Home Network which went down every day for 15 minutes to the Sprint Backbone which goes down 20-30 minutes each day

I left catalog.com last month because of all the down time like you guys said your site goes down 20 to 30 min a day. The strange thing is that i only had a few sites and was letting some of them go because they wasn't making enough to pay for themselves, i moved the sites i wanted to keep to a different hosting company and left the old ones i didn't want anymore thinking they would only get deleted at the end of the month that was 11 days ago and they are still up today!! They did change the admin password to the Raq on the day i thought they would get deleted so i can't get to them anymore but they are still up one of them gets 1,000 hits a day....i thought it was strange that they didn't deleted my sites and only changed the admin password.

Okay, yes, you have a point there when you say that there was no uptime guarantee anyway in the contract. I won't protest that, I signed up willingly. What I am extremely unhappy about is not the lack of an uptime guarantee, but their ATTITUDE towards us.

I would have thought that I deserved at least:

1. A mention of the word 'sorry' somewhere in their email replies. Isn't that basic courtesy?

2. A notification email about the problems and what steps were being taken to rectify them, and when I can expect service to be normal again. I got a big fat NOTHING. In fact, if I hadn't had loads of customers coming to me demanding why they can't access their sites, I wouldn't have even known that they were down. It was MY OWN initiative to email them, MY OWN initiative to take a look at thier forums to look for clues on what was happening. Can't they inform us first? Isn't that basic courtesy as well? They've got a network uptime page, can't they update that??

It makes a LOT of difference had they taken a more pro-active path. If they had notified us in as soon as they knew of the problems, and let us know that they were doing something about it, and perhaps give us an estimate of when things will be better, I am sure that many of us would be a lot less angry and less frustrated. We all in turn would have been able to inform our customers of the problem and tell them that it was being fixed. But no. Catalog does nothing hoping that we won't see it, and people like me have absolutely no idea what to tell our customers because we don't know what the problem is.

Their attitude sucks.

If they had half a brain, they would do ALL of the above, offer us a partial refund or something like that. I would be able to offer my customers the same refund, keep them updated on the problem, and ultimately keep them as customers.

In this industry, it all boils down to how you treat your customers. Network problems are unavoidable, there will be bad times, there will be downtimes. But treat your customers right and they will stick with you through thick and thin.

Originally posted by wtww
In this industry, it all boils down to how you treat your customers. Network problems are unavoidable, there will be bad times, there will be downtimes. But treat your customers right and they will stick with you through thick and thin.

That's what I have always said. Just be honest, upfront, courteous, and take proactive steps to resolve current issues.

Gary Peltola Or Pepsi

I will recommend you 2 of the companies I use maybe slightly higher than $379 BUT their network attacks are routed thru different backbones so at the worse you will get latency, not down time.... AND believe me I have been every where and learned my lesson:

Dialtone Internet and Digital Nation

Dialtone Internet ask them to beat Catalog's price plus 200 IPs for your Cobalt RaQ and I know they will do it. Digital Nation used to match price but most of the people I knew is not there any more.

Plus they do say "I am sorry" and they are honest with
you at front!

Another good company is RackSpace BUT way too high for a Cobalt RaQ which anyone can manage. (I do not have experience with RackSpace, I only know for forums).

The 2 companies you mentioned before never heard, so they maybe small as Catalog and you may see the same issues
in the future.

Regards,

Tony

<<MOD. NOTE - REMOVED 60 BLANK LINES>>

well i just checked a friend's site who was on catalog.com (he has 3 dedicated servers with them) - looks like he moved a couple of days ago as he is on a different host/nameservers now. Just 1 of his sites had 190,000 visitors/month at least - so that downtime must of cost him a fair bit.

Originally posted by romero
Gary Peltola Or Pepsi

I will recommend you 2 of the companies I use maybe slightly higher than $379 BUT their network attacks are routed thru different backbones so at the worse you will get latency, not down time.... AND believe me I have been every where and learned my lesson:

Dialtone Internet and Digital Nation

Dialtone Internet ask them to beat Catalog's price plus 200 IPs for your Cobalt RaQ and I know they will do it. Digital Nation used to match price but most of the people I knew is not there any more.

Plus they do say "I am sorry" and they are honest with
you at front!

Another good company is RackSpace BUT way too high for a Cobalt RaQ which anyone can manage. (I do not have experience with RackSpace, I only know for forums).

The 2 companies you mentioned before never heard, so they maybe small as Catalog and you may see the same issues
in the future.

Regards,

Tony


Thanks alot, i think i will decide on going with Hispeed, i just got a server with them last week and got a great deal on it. I am trying to see if they will give me the same price and same config that i got with Catalog

Joe Sullivan has been very good in terms of support, but i have a business to run and i cant afford for personal and business reasons to baby my server 24 hours a day, which i have had to do since getting this server.

There should be no doubt in anyones minds that catalog is a good company, but they dont bother to help you when you *really* need it, just like this weekend, I have NO IDEA why i was the only one getting these 1100 ms pings, do you think after 5 emails to catalog, i would get an answer? they still havent replied

After seeing the 'same' complaints from the 'same' people I have to defend Catalog.com

I have servers there and I get legendary service from them.

I get COURTESY, I get QUICK RESPONSES, I get UPDATES, I get QUICK FIXES to problems.

If you guys had customers carry on the way you do in public forums, would you be in a hurry to say ANYTHING to them in case it was misconstrued yet again.

I have had and still use servers with some of the other NOC's mentioned as 'excellent' and get nowhere near the level of service OR pricing on rental and support as Catalog give PLUS have in one case, constant and massive fluctuation in access speed, downtime for days.

Keeg makes sense. You should move to his network.

Venting your disapproval is one great thing about these forums, but doing it every few days about the same thing only indicates a low level of acumen.

If it hurts so much, GO.

You just make it bad for everyone who has NO problem.

Originally posted by felix220
After seeing the 'same' complaints from the 'same' people I have to defend Catalog.com

I have servers there and I get legendary service from them.

I get COURTESY, I get QUICK RESPONSES, I get UPDATES, I get QUICK FIXES to problems.

If you guys had customers carry on the way you do in public forums, would you be in a hurry to say ANYTHING to them in case it was misconstrued yet again.

I have had and still use servers with some of the other NOC's mentioned as 'excellent' and get nowhere near the level of service OR pricing on rental and support as Catalog give PLUS have in one case, constant and massive fluctuation in access speed, downtime for days.

Keeg makes sense. You should move to his network.

Venting your disapproval is one great thing about these forums, but doing it every few days about the same thing only indicates a low level of acumen.

If it hurts so much, GO.

You just make it bad for everyone who has NO problem.



I think anyone would move on the fly, if they werent locked into the agreement which they agreed upon when they signed up with Catalog or any other company.

It seems you dont keep as much track on your server as we do, but again, you may be on their @HOME network, which has its shares of outages

As for us, we are on their @Sprint Backbone, which is worse. It seems you were not affected by the DoS Attacks, because either you dont have a monitoring server (like we do and alot others) that notifies us when the server or link goes down, or you were on their @HOME Network

Anyone in this forum would agree that Catalog and CobaltRacks has some serious problems

AND...I finally got an answer from Catalog: The reason why the whole world excluding people in Alaska, and parts of the US were unable to get to the Catalog Network over last weekend (i was getting 1100+ pings) was because the traffic went though Cable and Wireless USA, the same backbone as Cobalt Racks. When it was tossed off CWUSA, it lost alot of data once it hit Sprint. So all weekend, i was stuck with 1100+ pings.

They terminated their @home connection last week. those connections are now rerouted throught their other existing connections. Mine went from @Home to Sprint. This has improved my connection drastically, but it is still slower than it should be. I have only 30ms latency to get to the sprint backbone. There is an additional 120-150 ms latency in the sprint network until I reach catalog's router. That is probably due to the increased traffic on the circuit connected to catalog.

They stated they are looking for a permanant home for the former @home connected servers and that Sprint is only temporary for us. I hope so.

From what i "heard" and I have not contacted anyone on this, but the connection going to the Sprint backbone is just a T1 connection

If anyone from catalog.com that views these boards, if you want to confirm...please do so

Originally posted by PepsiCoke
From what i "heard" and I have not contacted anyone on this, but the connection going to the Sprint backbone is just a T1 connection

I don't think that is true. I just downloaded a 3 meg file from my server via my DSL connection and it averaged well over 900 kbps. If it was only a T1, it would have only left a bit over 500 kbps for all other connections. So I don't believe it is only a T1. I would think it would be atleast a T3 or an OC1, but possibly only a 10Mbps Ethernet Fibre. Their website advertises redundant fibre connections to each facility, so I would suspect it to be either 10Mbps Ethernet fibre or an OC1 ATM line, or higher.

Thats what i wondered, they claim "multi-fibers" into each location, yet they just cant keep a stable connection

That was a MAJOR reason why i went to them in the first place

Catalog.ocm is now installing a new router through the night tonight. so it sounds like bandwidth from one of the backbones may not have been the only problem. It looks like their router couldn't handle all of the traffic during peak times. Hopefully this will cure the problems for good.

Any Updates?? Any more downtimes??