His work is the literary equivalent of a light flan or sorbet served between courses: it’s not the point of any meal it’s a part of but it’s not an uncomfortable course you have to wade through either.

While I could get into fairly extreme detail about everything that happens upstairs, as they broadcast it loudly to everyone within earshot, please allow me to instead explain through a letter I wrote to my landlord after tonight’s unscheduled grudge match. Items in curly brackets are of course substitutions for data I don’t feel like sharing.

To: my landlord
From: Ryan McKern
CC: Dorayne Boprey

Subject: A quick word about the neighbors

Hi {my landlord},
This is ryan from {where I live}. If I’ve sent this to the wrong address, my apologies, but it’s late and I didn’t have another email address for you; I’m pretty worked up right now and typing will help me keep this straight instead of just running off at the mouth.

We just had an altercation with our upstairs neighbor Marie (which had been simmering for a while) regarding the sheer quantity of fighting, shouting, and yelling up there. While she laid the blame on first Matthew (her son) and then us for actually having the gall to yell back at her, it was predominantly her getting worked up into hysterics that we heard.

I’m going to open right up with the fact that I shouted at them first tonight, in anger, and probably provoked the response we got from them by being the bully this time around, but since March the yelling and fighting has been constant. Invariably, Matthew storms out of the house, swearing loudly and threatening people, and then tears ass out of the driveway and screeches his tires the short distance up {the side road}. until he hits the stop sign. When they really get going, it sounds like a chorus of people incapable of communicating with each other through any means other than arguing. Every other day it is just a resounding stream of expletives that sounds like a short story constructed solely of four letter words. I don’t care if someone swears like a sailor, I just care when they’re doing it at 70db.

Matthew has “moved out” at least twice since March, which is as near as I can tell, what they call it after any loud argument in the yard, and none of them seems to even care that they have to share this space with other people. Mike has been, to date, the only voice we haven’t heard and the only one we haven’t seen yelling in the yard at someone else in the house. A week ago there was an argument so bad it started again when Matthew came back from where ever his temper tantrum took him to. When asked to please do something about the argument in the past, Marie has reacted with extremely passive-aggressive promises not to do it again, that feel more like intonations to stop bothering her about it. They have moved Matthew to another room and put Mallory into the room above our bedroom, which cut down on much of the noise there, but in the overall scheme of things, that wasn’t even a drop in the noise bucket.

Since they’ve moved in, we’ve accepted that they’re a loud family, and we can deal with the heavy foot steps, the broadcasting of every conversation they have, friends of the two teenagers coming and going (which to some degree they’ve irrelevantly blamed on {the neighbor next door}), the stale smell of cigarette smoke that sometimes surrounds the house, the barking dog, the dog being left outside in the middle of a summer day while they shout at it from their upstairs window, and a myriad array of other things that just come with having neighbors. I mean, we’ve got cats. They meow. Pets are loud. We’ve tried really hard to ignore their shouting and hollering during the day on the grounds that there are two teenagers upstairs and we didn’t get along with our parents at their ages either, but it’s out of control. They argue in their sun room, in their living room, in the yard, in the stair well (next to our bed room), and it’s getting to us. A lot of things about living underneath them get to us at different times, but the constant arguing and fighting is becoming impossible to deal with.

While tonight was the first time we lost our tempers with the neighbors, tonight was far from the worst it’s been living beneath them. While they were more than happy to shout back at us about “noises at 1:00am that we never said anything about”, we’re at a loss as to what they’re talking about (with the possible exception of long running Red Sox games, which we’ll admit we were probably loud about) as we assumed that they’d have said something if we were too loud, much like we’ve done for them in the past. I’d really like to talk to you about this when you have a few minutes because this feels like something that’s only going to grow and fester if we don’t clear the air on this. We like this apartment and we enjoy living here. We’ve gotten comfortable and we hope to make this our last apartment before we buy a home in a few years. We’d hate to think that something as ultimately petty as this is irreconcilable.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m available for phone calls during the day any time after 10am (do you have my office number? If not, it’s {none of your business, internet}) and I’m happy to stop by if you’d rather talk about it in person.

Ryan McKern and Dorayne Boprey

Jon is on vacation this week, and he “creatively massaged” some of a conversation we once had regarding his trip and how to obtain wireless access while away. I did what any upstanding administrator would do… I made myself a login for his site and corrected him.

It was that or building an entire joke site and uploading it in place of his existing one. If it was six hours earlier, that’s the way I would have gone.

n. opin·ion·at·ion

A country of people, all absoloutely positive that they’re positive that they’re always right, so you must obviously be both wrong, and an idiot.

Example: The gentleman in fatigues who was at the counter spent all afternoon pontificating upon the nature of modern civilizations dependency on oil. At the end of his bully-pulpit tirade, he pronounced that Democrats are all liars, and that they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear about energy to steal your vote. I wonder what color the sky is in his opinionation.

–

Jokes aside, the gentleman seems more like a cynically skeptical enlisted man than a crackpot. I’d have actually liked to hear him out, but he just couldn’t stop shouting. The American tendency to speak louder when we think you can’t understand us is probably one of the cultural traits that I’m most ashamed of.

No technical details to follow, but I had to drop and reimport a database backup to get everything back up and running.

I rule.

If you don’t want to read 36 hours worth of support ticket transcripts, the cliff notes version is that Tektonic basically went out of their way to lose my business.

So, I’ve moved into an account with Linode and while it’s still our honeymoon, it’s moving along pretty sweet right now. In the roughly 48 hours since the move from Old Busted to New Hotness, the traffic has spiked to approximately 5x the load due to my friend Rick, an editor involved in the news side of the comic book industry, parting ways with his now-former employer for the second time in a year. His site, a Wordpress powered site with only mild (read: not aggressive) caching is singlehandedly responsible for said 5x increase in incoming traffic. The new server has not even shrugged under the new load. No sweat has been broken. I might turn up available Apache processes to compensate but seriously, it just doesn’t seem to care.

Mon Aug 04 2008 11:20AM by Ryan

IP: (redacted)

Any one want to tell me why my VPS is reporting as “The system is unavailable” in the control panel, again?

This is the second time in the last week this has happened.

Realizing that I could not recieve their emails as my account was now down, I requested a simple follow-up at another address.

Mon Aug 04 2008 11:21AM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

Addendum: since my server is down, my email, again, doesn’t work. Please direct all correspondence to (redacted) until this is resolved.

At this point, the ticket was closed upon start up of server, without anyone telling me what happened or what they were doing about it. Approximately 12 hours elapsed after my account came back up, and it went down again.

Tue Aug 05 2008 11:38AM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

My VPS is down and reporting as “The system is unavailable” in the control panel, again. This is the third time since last week.

Is the machine my VPS lives on experiencing hardware problems?

Additionally, why was my ticket from yesterday closed with no correspondence?

Tue Aug 05 2008 11:44AM by support@tektonic.net

Hi, The host is currently down for a file system check as we found file system errors on the node. ETA is 1-2 hours.

That’s it. That’s the reply I received. Concise, yes. Almost to the point of rudeness. I wanted to ring them up and shout “WELL NO SHIT ASSHOLES, DO YOU KNOW WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING?”

But they don’t, so I didn’t. I’m classy.

Tue Aug 05 2008 11:48AM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

Why don’t you notify customers about these unexpected downtimes then they occur?

Is there a reason these downtimes almost always occur during peak hours?

Was anyone going to tell me that I may have suffered data loss from a potentially dirty file system?

Tue Aug 05 2008 12:02PM by support@tektonic.net

Hi, The outage wasn’t planned so a notice could not of been given. No data loss is expected.

For those playing along at home, those are the magic five words. That was when I did a sanity check in my nightly backups and began looking for a new host.

Tue Aug 05 2008 02:51PM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

“No data loss is expected” is not good enough. If I have files being written when this happens, or database tables being flushed while the system is halting, and the sync doesn’t happen fast enough or it writes the data to inodes that then get “massaged” by fsck on the way back up, there is a chance, though slim, of data loss.

The outage happened during business hours and it is well within reason to pull a list of affected customers whose accounts are and fire off a quick email to them along the lines of “hey, we dropped the ball and something blew up. again.”

Even if I wouldn’t haven gotten it, my email server being hosted on the affected VPS, the effort alone would keep me from foaming at the mouth over this.

As it is right now I’ve been down all day waiting for a filesystem check to finish up for the second time in as many days. Is there a plan to prevent this from happening? Is there a migration route to a more stable server?

Frankly put, and you can forward this to management or sales if you want since you’re so adamant about stratification between technical support and business administration (and I cannot seem to get a customer service phone number out of anyone there), what are you doing to keep my business? If the last 6 months of service are an indication, I can’t count on your service to be even marginally reliable. I’m not asking for the mythical 5 9’s in reliability here; I’m just asking for my account to not be knocked offline two days in a row because some system administrator didn’t notice a mess of disk write errors in /var/log/messages.

I cannot get a straight answer from anyone about whatever happened every time my VPS is offline. That’s infuriating enough, but this cavalier handling of my data is utterly unacceptable, especially seeing as how you just billed me for another month of this same level of lacking service YESTERDAY. Maybe I’m not pouring thousands of dollars of high end infrastructure dollars into your business, but maybe there is a damned good reason for that.

Tue Aug 05 2008 06:20PM by support@tektonic.net

Hello Ryan,

For major outages we post threads on the forums to track them. In regards to the current one it can found here. http://www.tektonic.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5089&posted=1#post5089 We find this much more efficient due to cases such as yours.

The previous errors you have seen were tied to the bad motherboard that was mentioned in the thread above. This will solve and future occurrences of such problems in the future.

We actively monitor all of our servers for a multitude of problems but things such as this can only have so much preventative measure put in place.

I apologize for any down time you’ve experienced due to the failed hardware and if there is anything we can do please let us know.

Thanks, Bruce

Tue Aug 05 2008 06:43PM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

I want someone to explain to me the contradictory statements of this support ticket thread and the forum thread, specifically why when I asked explicitly about data loss or file corruption, I received the curt reply of:

“No data loss is expected.”

No context, no explanation, nothing more than a terse 5 word answer that provides me with as much assurance as it does information.

Now, having had this forum thread pointed out to me FINALLY, I checked the thread to find the following from Matt Ayres:

“VPS’s are starting. There may be file corruption.”

I also want to know why no one thought to point out this forum thread when they knew this was going to become an all day affair. I’ve been waiting since 2:00pm for what I thought was just an fsck to complete.

Also, why isn’t my VPS running yet if the VPSes were coming back up as of what looks to be 6:30pm EST from the forum? The control panel still lists my VPS status as “The system is unavailable”.

Tue Aug 05 2008 07:40PM by support@tektonic.net

Hello,

Initially it was believed to be a simple issue with the raid card that just needed replacing. At the time of comment we had no indication of possible data loss.

After swapping the card it became apparent that it was indeed a motherboard issue.

In regards to the last part of your email there was more corruption and errors present then we had anticipated. Starting the VPS’s began ok but was not stable.

Thanks, Bruce

I am officially spitting blood at this point. But it’s ok, I’ve made up my mind and started moving ahead. Nothing to do now but log into the server that is finally up, and start moving over whatever incidentals I might have missed in my nightly backup, right?

Wed Aug 06 2008 10:47AM by Ryan

Client IP: (redacted)

I see my server is down, again. That’s ok though. After being fed up with the fiasco yesterday, I moved into a new account last night, at more than twice the price for a little less than double the resources, with a company who promised me, explicitly, that they could provide a more stable account than you. They had me at “we can do better than tektonic” and the price never even entered into it.

It didn’t help your case any that my databases, file system, and in some cases system binaries were all corrupted by the errant, but recurring, hardware problems. Fortunately for all involved (but no one more so than me) I smelled this coming three weeks ago and started rsyncing the important data and nightly database backups off the server the last time there was an extended outage.

I’m canceling my account, and I’ll be contacting sales to request a full refund of the payment posted for early august as I’ve been unable to use my account thus far, and have no intentions of continuing to use it any longer. If you can expedite that process, wonderful. If not, well, that doesn’t seem to be any different from any other experience I’ve had with your support.

I’m honestly amazed how, looking back at the year on and off between two accounts I spent with Tektonic at how often my VPS was down, unavailable, or unpredictable. Looking at your server uptime report, it kills me to see how my account invariably winds up placed on the least reliable server in your farm.

Sometimes, every once in a little while, I do so love my job.

Yeah. My employer clear like a hojillion dollars a year from aerospace, defense, physics research, financial sectors, anything involving matrix calculations or intense simulation, but that just doesn’t fly when you’re having a pissing contest with your dotcom friends.

You say “we have soda fountains on every floor and I show up at work at 10am in dirty jeans and flip flops”, and your friends at cool dotcom’s say “we don’t even show up at work half the time, when we do we’re drunk, and we’ve got a fully stocked bar with hand-jobs on tap.”

Incidentally, I am sharing my recipe for diavolo sauce with you. Try it. Really, it’s good.