photo credit: ph0t0 {loves you too}

I’ve just had a run-in with my old hosting provider ServerGrid and it has just escalated to a point where I can’t work with them any more. The latest debacle consisted of them turning off one of my websites last week because they alleged that I was using a section of  it to send spam! Those pages hadn’t been in use for a couple of years, so this was highly unlikely, but they deactivated the site without any notification. I realised this a couple of days later, so raised a ticket about the problem. It’s now 5 (FIVE) days later and I’m still waiting for the ticket to be resolved! How shoddy is that!

I’ve just looked over my ticket history and I raised 27 tickets this year, most of them caused by sites being down or non-responsive. Most of the tickets were pretty frustrating. I would raise a ticket that there was a problem, they reply a few hours later saying that it looks fine at their end, I tell them I still have a problem, then a few hours later the box gets reset (problem goes away) and they email back saying that it still looks fine from their end.

As I’m writing this post The Only Network is still offline but I’ve already made the domain change to move it to my new host (Tubu, whom I love). I raised the ticket last Thursday about this and it’s Tuesday now and well, I’m sick of being treated like crap. The ineptitude of their staff and their sheer reluctance to help means that they have lost one customer who was happy to sing their praises in the past.

Goodbye ServerGrid. I won’t be missing you!

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn’t change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

Great aren’t they? If you’ve worked in IT for any measuable amount of time, you’re bound to has assumed, or seen someone assume, one of the fallacies above. But they will always come back and haunt you!

Nigel, one of my colleagues, is a firm believer that things were better in the mainframe days. Things were simpler, more controlled and infintely more reliable. His favourite anecdote recounts a speaker at a conference who went up on stage bouncing a basketball. He compared this to a mainframe, easy to control. He then pulls out a bucket of ping pong balls, throws it into the audience and then asks them how then can control that. It think that comparison is a bit harsh, however, it does outline the non-linearity that distributed computing suffers from when it comes to issues of control, manageability and fault control.

Personally, I think it’s a matter of market/technology granularity. Yes, a mainframe may seem more dependable, but that’s mainly because you’re dealing with one supplier who? gets called in when there’s an issue. The end-user never sees the individual components that make up a system, it’s a black-box that someone else manages, so yes, it’s surely going to look like an easier environment. Distributed apps are likely to be running on disperate hardware, across multiple operating systems, supplier and supported by different vendors, all with their own support procedures. And this is where non-linearity steps in. In mathematics, a nonlinear system is one whose behavior can’t be expressed as a sum of the behaviors of its parts (or of their multiples.) (more on Wikipedia). The challenge software/system/technical architects? today face is expressing this non-linearity in terms of risk so that the business can understand it. It still is a thorny issue though.

Do you come across these problems in your day job?

Luckily I came across a KB article on MSDN which outlines a number of things you can try when things go wrong. There are a number of things I tried there, including trying to isolate the Add-In that was causing the problem, but there was nothing appearing in Add-In manager that seemed tied to LogMeIn. In the end, I went for the option to Reset IE7. This deletes all your settings,? clears your Add-Ins, your favourites, everything. It basically reverts IE7 to its factory settings. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Internet Explorer 7, click Tools, and then click Internet Options.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Reset.
3. In the Internet Explorer Default Settings dialog box, click Reset.
4. When the settings have been reset, click Close, and then click OK to restart Internet Explorer.

The verdict: It fixed my problem! The next time I hit LogMeIn, it installed the Add-In properly for me and everything works! Good tip to keep in mind.

Disappointing really. I was really happy with Virtual PC