Normally.. I wouldn't bring this up in a public forum. But after being ignored. I feel it's the only thing to do.

We got a dedicated server with Knox Wimberly of SmartWeb with CPanel. We didn't use it the first month or so. A few weeks before
June we started throwing over clients to the machine (this is the only machine that we have that's not in Equinix
- Chicago) and then the main hard-drive crashes. Ok. That's totally alright, hardware failure happens. We're back
up on the secondary because he's out of replacement drives. We wait a couple weeks...

He gets the a replacement hard-drive in. We wait until this past Thursday to get it mounted (I think it was a full day we waited). We mount it -- reboot. It doesn't come back up.
Possibility of our failure is there, but the fstab line should've been correct. As we have done it billions of times.
But hey ... the possibility is there that we screwed up. Anyways... Knox isn't around. We leave a message on his
cellphone, and after awhile we sent a ticket to the ticketing system (which I don't think is being answered or is
not working). Ok time goes by, lots of time. I see him on Instant Messanger!(It was after 12AM and our box went down
before 5PM.) My business partner messages him and talks to him, he asks for the root password. It's given. Now that's
our last correspondance. It has now been 48 hours, our server has been down. We have not got anything back from them.
He's been on AIM, I left messages. He'll go idle and come back. Stay non-idle forever and then just go back to being
idle. We've left messages on his cellphone, tried to call the emergancy phone number. Nobody is answering.

To me it's common sense that they are ignoring us. I mean a hosting company that does not answer their emails and when Knox for instance is online via Instant Messanger and is not idle. But hey -- anything is possible. All I ask is for answers and I'm not getting them.

On his support website ( http://techsupportdesk.com ), you click Network Status and you can see that our server (oxygen) is
down. Last time I sent an email to support@techsupportdesk.com, I got this back:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

pipe to |/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl
generated by support@techsupportdesk.com
Child process of virtual_address_pipe transport returned 2 from command:
/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ pipe to |/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl
generated by support@techsupportdesk.com ------

Can't locate /home/perldesk/www/helpdesk/include/conf.pl at /home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl line 27.


I didn't want to bring this to a public forum to bash him. But after 48 hours.. we're still down and with no answers. I wrote them an email last night and told them that all I'm asking for is answers and if I didn't get anything by 5:00PM EST, I would try and get answers via WHT. Because we all know, they usually respond when lots of people are reading about them.

I'm not paying $99.00 mo and expecting everything. I got a quality server with quality bandwidth at a moderate price. I go with companies like this so I don't have to worry about this kind of stuff. Maybe expecting answers in a timely fashion is too much to ask. I guess the people we have rackspace with right now have spoiled us rotten. But I don't think that's the case.

We've been down 48 hours and the clock is ticking and we're loosing customers because we don't have their files.

think i saw smartweb posting in another forum yesterday :)

Knox is on vacation this week I believe, I think he left his partner in charge...

His last post on WHT was 06-21-2002 11:47 PM..

Which would be last night.

Give me a call at 404-641-5641 or e-mail/PM me and we'll get this straightened out with you - I have not been able to reach Knox as well, and that's why the box is still down.

EDIT: I would be happy to assist anyone who is having troubles with SmartWeb to help out Knox while he is on vacation, feel free to give me a call. Knox is a great guy, and his vacation is well deserved.

Best Regards,

Originally posted by jkehe
Give me a call at 404-641-5641 or e-mail/PM me and we'll get this straightened out with you - I have not been able to reach Knox as well, and that's why the box is still down.

EDIT: I would be happy to assist anyone who is having troubles with SmartWeb to help out Knox while he is on vacation, feel free to give me a call. Knox is a great guy, and his vacation is well deserved.

Best Regards,

I second that Knox is a great guy, we all have some problems. He is very often appearing online and idle and away but is not actually there as I have learnt many times. Try getting hold of I think his name is Kyle who replies to a lot of support requests.

As I stated before -- Knox has been a great guy. I didn't want to bring this to a public forum, but this amount of downtime shouldn't be occuring.

Looks like we might have the problem solved though, still waiting..

Followup to this:

Jeffrey Kehe drove to the datacenter and he's helping me get the box back up. My thanks to him, and I feel like an ******* for making him do it. But it needed to get back online. Thanks for all your input.

I wish sleep wasn't optional for people in the server business.

Have a great morning everyone! :)

Regards,

hmm it appears that someone called Kyle Reilly works for them, try PMing the username Kylecool on this forum (which is Kyle Reilly's username)

All I have to say is A HUGE thank you to Jeff from serverhost. I was having a problem with one of my servers and Bind and I called Jeff because I read this post. Needless to say, Jeff was a saint and helped me out. Thanks Jeff. Also jeff please check your private messages.

-Steven

None of my business I know but do you work for some of these companies or are you like freelance support admin?

I work for Serverhost. I'm working on getting my CCNA too, any advice for the test? :)

Sure Jeff,

I have a stack load of word docs, pdf's and more here. These are invaluable as a resource if you want to email me I can send you the lot (or FTP them somewhere)


I see you work for serverhost ;) but I was just interested why you pop down to NOC's fixing other peoples servers (or is that part of your business or do you affiliate with smartweb for example?)

just being curious :cartman:

SmartWeb has a few servers with us, but the majority of their business is now in another data center in Tampa. The one server here (404labs) was one of our boxes. The other server (insiderhosting) was in Tampa, and luckily just needed some remote work, because I don't have access to SmartWeb's stuff in Tampa, nor would I want to drive there at 3 AM. :eek:

I'll drop you an e-mail with FTP info. Thanks!

Ah I see that cleared it up :)

Hi, glad it is all fixed up, and yes I do work for SmartWeb, LLC.

i'm waiting 5 days on a support request - they do not have staff whilst they are on holiday to cover ?? What if a server goes down (hard ware related) during their holiday period?
Need Kyle of Knox to reply to a ticket I have open ASAP.

If anyone hears from Knox, please have him contact me immediately. Thanks.

Try sending in a trouble ticket or calling him. :)

Knox is back and sorting out the current mess left for him to sort.

Originally posted by Kylecool
Try sending in a trouble ticket or calling him. :)

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

pipe to |/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl
generated by support@techsupportdesk.com
Child process of virtual_address_pipe transport returned 2 from command:
/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ pipe to |/home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl
generated by support@techsupportdesk.com ------

Can't locate /home/perldesk/www/helpdesk/include/conf.pl at /home/support/public_html/helpdesk/include/email.pl line 27.


=============

I guess I'll call him in the morning.

Ok, you can call him, or submit a ticket through our helpdesk. We no longer accept helpdesk emails just by emailing our support desk, you must create an account, login, and submit a ticket. This enables you to track your request and all relevant information, and helps us look up past tickets in case there is a reference needed. The url is: http://techsupportdesk.com/helpdesk/pdesk.cgi

-Kyle :stickout

the network status page on your support site is scary. i hope that page isn't fully functional yet and/or knox has alot of coffee and aspirin. :)

The network is running good, but some servers don't run some services from what I gather - and they have not made them "n/a" so it looks bad. Hopefully they can tweak it because the other day everything was green before they added more servers to the page.

Hi, yes, on a lot of servers, only certain services run. DNS doesn't run on all of the servers, and other services are on/off depending on which server it is, etc. I haven't worked out the bugs yet, but I do plan on fixing that script, and editing it immensely to reflect those changes. Sorry for any confusion. :)

-Kyle

Hello, folks.

Just to clarify a few things here:

1) I was on vacation last week. I was staffing a church camp for youth in Louisiana. I was completely unreachable during this time. Kyle was on vacation too.

2) I hired a competant admin to handle tickets while I was out of town. Unfortunately, this didn't work out too well.

3) We accept full responsibility for what has happened and are working with our clients that were affected (actually a very small percentage) for quick resolution.

4) Our Tampa Data Center network staff was still on duty and monitoring our network.

5) I'm not getting much sleep right now and still have over 1900 Emails to sort. :(

Originally posted by jkehe


This mes......

I am curious as to the connection between Knox and jkehe. Knox seems to be a moderator on the Serverhost support forums. And Serverhost seems to be a company owned/tied somehow to Dragon.com.

And yet here he is writting a complaint about the Smartwebservice's helpdesk.

Is Serverhost buying servers from Smartweb? (and if so, how is he can he be offering them so cheap?) The connection to Dragon.com?

Why is Knox a moderator on the Serverhost forums?

I am lost, was about to get one of the servers from ServerHost...and now I am really wondering about BOTH these companies!

(as a side note- I do want to say that I have a server with smartwebservice, and I love it, great machine, no downtime, support has been great! I am just really curious now!)

I gave Knox administration privilages in the forum because he has helped us out in the past with posting to help users. Smartweb is a customer of ours. Serverhost is owned by Dragon Networks. Nothing hidden there. I was frustrated earlier in the week when I could not get in contact with Knox, because his customers were calling me for support. Now that Knox is back, that problem has gone away. I don't see anything else to be curious about. If there is - drop me an e-mail - and I'll clue you in to whatever you need to know. Thanks for your interest!

Sorry if I sounded liek I was second guessing you two, Knox is great, I know that from my dealings with him. I was just ...shocked.... I guess would be the right word, when I found him and you somehow connected. Made me wonder, and with all the BS going on in the hosting world....I jsut had to ask.

Thanks for the info!

We are in ServerHost's racks in Atlanta at Global Compass (in the multi homed, good bandwidth solution). I have helped Jeff out with support on his forums and a little admin work here and there. There is no other affiliation between our companies nor Jeff and I.

As a side note, our Tampa Data Center has NO connection at all. This is where most of our servers are now.

Originally posted by kwimberl
As a side note, our Tampa Data Center has NO connection at all. This is where most of our servers are now.

I bet it has a connection -- just not to Serverhost. :D

LOL