Nailchipper

It appears I might have made a mistake recommending Aplus. Their sales team is great. The administrators seem to be a bit more incompetent. I had a horrible situation happen last night.

My Fault
Last night I decided to make backup tarballs of important directories, such as /var and /home. I decided I was going to keep the tarballs in /root where I would then make a bigger tarball and date it. Well, I forgot /etc, so I went back to / and tarred it. But instead of using “sudo mv *.tar /root” I did “sudo mv /etc /root“, which moved my system settings to /root/etc! This meant that “sudo” was useless because it would not find /etc/sudoers, it also meant that “su” was useless because it would not find /etc/passwd and it also meant that I could not move the files back because I was using a user account! The good news about this situation was that it is a very simple problem and the system itself could stay up without any problems for a long period of time. As long as pages were being served, I did not mind that I could not log in. I figured I can call Aplus, and they’ll fix it with almost no down time.

Their Fault
So I call Aplus and tell them that I needed someone to boot up the system with a live cd, such as Knoppix, and move /root/etc back to /etc. This is a task that would bring down the server for a total of 5 minutes, and the time would mostly be spent booting. The actual “fix” would be about 5 seconds: type “mv /root/etc /etc” and reboot. I warned them that simply rebooting the system would render it useless because /etc/fstab would not be found and the kernel would not know where to mount the partitions. Well, it appears that they rebooted the system anyways, probably saw a bunch of error messages and instead of calling me immediately, they walked away from it.

I started to call dedicated support after the server as down for about 30 minutes and they told me that they were working on it. Reasonable, I thought. But after a few hours I started getting annoyed and wanted it fixed as soon as possible. I called every half hour from 9pm to 2am and then woke up at 9am and started calling until 12pm the next day, everyone kept saying “we’re are working on it” and to “check back later”

At around noon they then claimed that I now needed to pay $150 per hour to fix it. Fix what? Well, what they consider a fix is what I considered doing what they were supposed to in the first place. They said need to put a new “ticket” to fix it and that I would need to fax them an authorization form to pay them for an hour’s work (an hour!?). This problem was now more complicated and out of the “free” support. They also needed about 2 hours for the administrators to get through their ticket queue so that they can move a file. A total of 3 hours for the server to be up after they claimed they’ve been working on it for about 12 hours.

Not only did the administrators mess up big time by leaving the server dead, but the people I am in contact with either did not care to tell me there was a larger problem, did not bother to call the administrators to find out what was going on, did not think this was very important, or thought that 15 hours to move a file was reasonable. Now I ask: Why did they reboot it when I told them that simply rebooting would be bad? Why am I now paying for a problem they created themselves after they refused to listen to me?
The sales people were great. Technical support has been less than stellar in the way they handled this minor problem.

The server finally went up at 2:36 EST