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  1. #26
    Join Date
    Nov 2004
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    464
    This has been a few years ago, but I did have a machine catch on fire in the rack. Made life entertaining for a couple of days.
    Linn Boyd

  2. #27
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    WebHostingTalk
    Posts
    8,901
    Quote Originally Posted by TheDingy
    This has been a few years ago, but I did have a machine catch on fire in the rack. Made life entertaining for a couple of days.
    Yeah - come to think of it, I've had that happen to. It wasnt a machine, but an APC UPS (3000 series) at the bottom of the rack. It was great trying to get that thing unracked while it was still burning.

    Sirius
    I support the Human Rights Campaign!
    Moving to the Tampa, Florida area? Check out life in the suburbs in Trinity, Florida.

  3. #28
    Join Date
    Nov 2004
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    464
    At least you were there I was in the air when it started.
    Linn Boyd

  4. #29
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Location
    Ashburn VA, San Diego CA
    Posts
    4,615
    Had a relatively large rackmount UPS (~1500VA) blow up in my face as I was kneeling down behind it pluggin the unit in. Apparently the electricians accidentally wired the 120V outlet with 240V power. The EMI flash 10 inches from my face left me jittery for several minutes.

    To top it off, a breaker went and took out some other gear as well...oh and this was in the primary NOC in a major airport.

    It's amazing where you can find high levels of incompetence.
    Last edited by FastServ; 10-26-2006 at 08:45 AM.
    Fast Serv Networks, LLC | AS29889 | DDOS Protected | Managed Cloud, Streaming, Dedicated Servers, Colo by-the-U
    Since 2003 - Ashburn VA + San Diego CA Datacenters

  5. #30
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    963
    Quote Originally Posted by WebDevourer
    Hi,

    I justed started colocating my own box. I was wondering what is the worst situation that you faced while colocating. Did 2 hard drives in a RAID5 configuration broke at the same time? Did all your hardware and hard drives burned due to electrical problems? I want to know what is the most difficult situations that I can face.
    A customer of mine had a rack of gear at JMAWired in SF. I managed everything for them on contract, and one day I happened to be out drinking with the customer's CTO. My outside monitoring system paged us that every service was down. Since we were only 4 blocks away, we stumbled over to see what the problem was.

    I'd never seen a man's jaw really drop before the moment we walked into the colo, and I think my jaw dropped even further. The goons at JMA were rewiring the colo. The entire colo floor (which only had about 5 cabinets of gear) was being rewired for power. JMA had never bothered to tell any of their customers this.. The only power in that room was for the lights.

    This incident happened either around 10pm on either the 4th or 5th of November, 2004 This was very problematic, since my customer's business was in providing a campaigning platform for various DNP candidates.. After an hour and a half of arguing, threatening, and screaming, we managed to get them to run some orange cables to the cabinet so we could get everything back online.

  6. #31
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    WebHostingTalk
    Posts
    8,901
    Quote Originally Posted by TheDingy
    At least you were there I was in the air when it started.
    Ewwww... I was on my way out the door, carded in to the datacenter on a whim and walah, saw it smoking away!

    Sirius
    I support the Human Rights Campaign!
    Moving to the Tampa, Florida area? Check out life in the suburbs in Trinity, Florida.

  7. #32
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas
    Posts
    799
    Quote Originally Posted by lpmusic
    Box fried at HE.

    (they're all just playing games in the NOC anyways).
    lol, yes how did you know, you local ?


    HE is a good colo provider, but the NOC in the other hand what you say about they all play games is right.

  8. #33
    Join Date
    Jan 2002
    Location
    Yuba City, CA
    Posts
    358
    Quote Originally Posted by Jeffyt
    Two words: Charles Baker
    My two words are: Ray Womach
    David
    Beenanza, LLC

  9. #34
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas
    Posts
    799
    Quote Originally Posted by DaveNET
    My two words are: Ray Womach

    i will love to know, whats the big deal with these names ?

  10. #35
    Quote Originally Posted by Ivan23
    lol, yes how did you know, you local ?


    HE is a good colo provider, but the NOC in the other hand what you say about they all play games is right.
    Yes, I live about 15 minutes away...
    http://photos.lp-musix.net/index.php...e=IMG_0292.jpg <- fried mother board
    Silicon Valley Web Hosting - Bay Area Bare-Metal and 1U to Full Rack Colocation

    www.svwh.net

  11. #36
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    WebHostingTalk
    Posts
    8,901
    Quote Originally Posted by lpmusic
    Yes, I live about 15 minutes away...
    http://photos.lp-musix.net/index.php...e=IMG_0292.jpg <- fried mother board
    Nice little burn up there....

    Sirius
    I support the Human Rights Campaign!
    Moving to the Tampa, Florida area? Check out life in the suburbs in Trinity, Florida.

  12. #37
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas
    Posts
    799
    ya, but that system look to be very old same with the power supply

  13. #38
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas
    Posts
    799
    Quote Originally Posted by lpmusic
    Yes, I live about 15 minutes away...
    http://photos.lp-musix.net/index.php...e=IMG_0292.jpg <- fried mother board

    << About 3mins away

  14. #39
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas
    Posts
    799
    nervermind, your photos is not the same system

  15. #40
    Join Date
    Jan 2002
    Location
    Yuba City, CA
    Posts
    358
    Quote Originally Posted by Ivan23
    i will love to know, whats the big deal with these names ?
    I'll leave it to your searching prowess to figure this out. That's all I'll say for now.
    David
    Beenanza, LLC

  16. #41
    Join Date
    Apr 2004
    Posts
    1,834
    Quote Originally Posted by DaveNET
    I'll leave it to your searching prowess to figure this out. That's all I'll say for now.
    You have beaten that horse dead in so many different ways. Now you are myspelling my name. It's Ray Womack.

    One thing that most of you need to realize is that most of are really good people trying to do a good job, however there can be many circumstances and bad business decisions that become out of our control. Things that the client never sees.

    Let me share with you my worst colocation experience I have had, and it will somewhat answer what David just will not quit talking about -- as it became something out of my hands.

    I HAD a colocation operation in Dallas in a cage at Colo4Dallas at one time totaling over 100 dedicated machines. I was recognized as the fastest growing client Colo4 had and had a deal setup to take 1,000 square feet of space in the new expansion. Signed Contract.

    I HAD been in negotiations with my largest server customer who roughly represented 65%, to joine forces and become a PARTNERSHIP.

    After a year of having this company as my customer, and both negotiating a PARTNERSHIP for the last 3 months of our relationship (as I shared my cost, contractual information, and sources....right down to my sources licenses, distriburitor agreements for buying hardware, everything) he just figured he that he would negotiate his own deal with Colo4Dallas.

    I will not prentend that I did not get sideways with Colo4Dallas during this period, and most of it was my fault. And I do not blame Colo4Dallas any way in what happened to me. Now, back to the story.

    I signed another contract with another datacenter, and was moving. I arranged the sale of 15 or so dedicated servers that were leased hardware I owned BACK to this person. I also sold them my switching, nameservers, released my IP block and fully coperated so the his 50 or so dedicated customers would not be upset, and we could just part ways. I received $10,000 for this.

    The actual physical transition of the machines was a complete disaster for us because our machines were last to be moved, after a complete shutdown and moving of nearly 80+ servers to a new space. This is because his machines were the first to be moved while mine were sitting. Some of my clients were down for as long as 4 days, even more.

    Part of the handshake agreement to hand over my business to my largest client was to hold these servers in his space, and he would buy the hardware and allow us to do a soft transition to our new facility in 2 months. That was included in the $10,000 agreement -- moving and holding of 23 of my most profitable accounts.

    As customers started dropping like flies, I sent over a list of servers he previouslly agreed to purchase, then he backed out because he said he was now "broke" and that moving cost him a ton of money. He also backed out on buying the infrastructure, switches, and name servers.

    He changed the passwords to the name servers, then sent me a rediculous bill to reclaim my own hardware he was holding. Then he shut down the remaining accounts we had after we paid him extortion money which he claimed was for tickets and moving machines.

    Lastly, he held on to one Dual Xeon that he had his eye on, and held it hostage. We owed him something like $600 on bogus billing and the value of the machine was roughly $1,700. He tried to claim that that would just be an even exchange in some twisted way. This went on and on for about 2 days, and finally he agreed to release my assets for the $600. We paypaled him $600 the same day the agreement was made to release it. Then he claimed after payment was made would not release the server until 3-5 business days untill the money was transferred into his bank account. Then he comes back in 5 days and says it will take 45 days to give me back my $1,700 machine and that he would just keep it for up to 45 more days. After pleaing with him he then wanted all kinds of notarized stuff sent to him in the mail that we would not dispute the paypal payment from both me AND my wife.

    Finally we convinced him to release MY hardware that I paid for about 2 weeks later, but wait, HE MADE US SIGN SOME STUPID STATEMENT THAT WE WOULD NOT TALK BADLY ABOUT HIM ON WHT AND THAT WE WOULD NOT TALK ABOUT HIS FINANCIAL INFORMATION.

    Moral of the story is, you never know when you are dealing with a psychopath as your colocation, even if he was your friend and client even for well over a year. We made a critical mistake by doing a handshake and not a contract.

    I'm sorry Dave that you have to look to find new ways to hurt me, but you were definatly a victim of this situation.
    Last edited by RayWomack; 10-30-2006 at 10:23 PM.
    Ray Womack @ atOmicVPS LTD
    Linux & Windows Cloud Hosting Solutions Powered by OnApp
    Fully Managed [Shared][Reseller][Cloud VPS] [Dedicated]
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  17. #42
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Posts
    1,635
    ^ Chaos in the last post..

    I was also wondering what the names mean and I can already see it.

    I get the picture from both sides.

  18. #43
    My worst case... hmm lets just say that was the moment the police came in,
    took my server (which was my main nfs server for the entire neighbourhood),
    Demolished the entire server due to unexperienced people, lost 8TB of data(all legal) due to it, and got sued by some guys that dont know **** of music rights in mp3.

    I have all mp3's legal, same for video's (i buy a lot at amazon and bol.com or applestore) and what do you get? a big hug from the dutch masters themselves....
    asking if i would like to pay up 500 euro's per title

    Well that was the worst thing i got with colocating That was my own small little 4U server.

    My little less worst case, my entire backup server fried. Then one day later my main server failed. (i still had a backup), then my backup backup server failed. then when you think you had it all in one day. The DC powergrid failed. Talk about MAJOR bad luck in 2 days.
    TwiLight INC - Our products: (managed) Colocation, Dedicated servers, RTO, Transit
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  19. #44
    Join Date
    Jun 2001
    Location
    Denver, CO
    Posts
    3,302
    This is actually a Charles Baker story ... We had some servers colocated at Yipes's data center in Denver (prior to their chapter 11) through Charles. One night we called their NOC up for a server reboot, and they told us that they couldn't reboot our servers because they were no longer in the colocation business. We had to move out during the weekend in the middle of the night into another data center. During the move, our SQL Server lost three drives - a mirrored array and two from a RAID 5, so I also had to manually restore about 80 SQL Server databases. On top of it all, we had a 1 yr contract with Charles, and we wouldn't let us out of the deal - even though Yipes was a sinking ship. We had about 3 months left on the contract, and he wouldn't let our equipment leave the building until we signed something telling him we would be paying for the two remaining months. Ironically, we were invoiced for an extra month of service and ended up having to do a chargeback on him because he failed to responded to repeated requests for a refund.

    We have also had breakers trip, mobos fry at 2:00am, ddos attack while I'm in Puetro Rico on 28.8K dialup connection, had my tech support manager just disappear for 4 days less than I week before I was supposed to get married.

    Also a nightmare, Savvis nearly termianted our service because we didn't respond to a phishing complaint from them within an hour; the complaint was sent to us on a Sunday afternoon during a holiday weekend. This is the only direct complaint we have ever received from Savvis.

    Another nightmare, one of our dedicated customers was being investigated by the FBI/IRS for tax fraud, preparing fraudulent tax returns, money laundering, etc. They wanted to seize all of our equipment. We had to hire a very expensive lawyer ($350/hr), gave him the equipment that they really needed access to, and the equipment apparently sat in the guys safe for months.

    Gotta love the war stories.
    Jay Sudowski // Handy Networks LLC // Co-Founder & CTO
    AS30475 - Level(3), HE, Telia, XO and Cogent. Noction optimized network.
    Offering Dedicated Server and Colocation Hosting from our SSAE 16 SOC 2, Type 2 Certified Data Center.
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  20. #45
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Chicago, IL
    Posts
    6,957
    This was a LONG time ago, before we had our own space, etc.

    I was colocated with someone basically just reselling space out of another DC, it was a non-critical box, though it was about a $4k box, and he stopped paying his bill. I called the DC and asked them to just charge my card to get my single box back up, I identified the system, etc. They said it would be about $200, and put the box back up. When I got my CC bill back, they had charged $3k, the total bill owed by the person I was purchasing from. I was then stuck choosing whether I wanted them to ship a $4k box back to me and pay the $3k or just do a chargeback for the $3k.

    That wasn't a MAJOR issue, I just ended up being out $3k, but when you're 14-15 $3k is a LOT of money and that put me in a big hole for a couple months. Other than that, the three other companies I dealt with were great.
    Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
    VMware Virtual Data Center Platform

    karl @ steadfast.net - Sales/Support: 312-602-2689
    Cloud Hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Chicago Colocation, and New Jersey Colocation

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